There’s an intersection between Los Angeles and San Francisco that I think about a lot. It’s next to Blackwell’s Corner — the very last place James Dean visited before he died. There is a giant cut-out of him beside the road; his blasé impression remains a constant image in my mind. The image has been stuck there since the beginning of 2018 during a family trip to the USA. We had flown into San Francisco and spent five days there before driving down to Los Angeles. It was on this road trip that we came across the intersection in Lost Hills, California — completely by coincidence.

I remember standing by the huge cut-out of James Dean with my sister, living in a moment of immortal jelly as Mum snapped a picture of us beside him. I remember looking up. Feeling a bit funny. I remember the faded red ‘TEXACO’ sign, the slowly scooping sun, and the way the clouds smiled back at me. The winter breeze was sweet, and streetlights were sparse in the fading sunlight. The air turned cool as the soft roll of car tyres crinkled with each passed-over pebble. My little red boots were dusty in the gravel, kicking up smoke as I walked through the carpark, trailing after Dad.

It felt exciting in that place; like more. A more that drifted down from the stars in the sky and tickled my heart: a cold warmth. The feeling was fond, even in its disconnection. It was soft and it was quiet. I couldn’t always place that moment in time, or restrict it to the past or the present. It felt like a moment removed from time entirely. It was too plural, too arbitrarily connected, for me to reduce to a point in time or space. I miss that place now, and wonder whether it would be the same if I went back. I miss that moment, miss myself. I miss people, but maybe I don’t. I don’t miss anyone, I think. Maybe I just miss.

James Dean’s shadow shook softly in the wind. Trees and tufts of grass bordered the petrol station; the plains surrounding were void. I felt as though my brain was gone and my heart had taken its place. I thought only through feeling and the feeling hurt. But it was a good hurt that made me think; a hurt that made me wonder past the sky.

I remember feeling a need to label that physical intensity. This intensity that morphed into a sense of overwhelm so consuming I felt that nothing could be funnelled into a singular actuality. I let that feeling — whatever it was, consume me. And in the jumbled throws of it, I caught a depth in the sky. A depth that came from the amounting of seemingly meaningless moments to that of a whole. I watched the intersection become that whole in the front of my mind; those mundane fragments amounting to a complete.

I wondered if it was just me feeling all these things as I walked into the gas station with my sister, our parents in front of us. Inside, there was silence and flickering lights; statues of elderly women with wide eyes and aquiline noses offered us their palms. I went quiet, took my little sister’s hand. Pickled eggs lined plastic shelves and red-topped metal barstools stood tucked under the diner counter. Flickering fluorescent light emanated from above; my eyes pulsated beneath my glasses in specks of purple and green. It was all unfamiliar as our new sneakers squeaked against the patterned linoleum.

We washed our pale hands in the powder blue sinks of the gas station bathroom. Country music crackled through the speakers. My sister’s giggles echoed through my brain, tugging at memories of us talking about how much we despise that genre. The memories felt too distant to grasp as she stood there right beside me — I couldn’t hold them; they fell through my hands like purple soap. The music never left the bathroom: it paused in time and space with her and me. The feeling was intense then. I shivered as I made eye contact with myself in the mirror, lowered my gaze as I watched the final soapy suds slip down the drain.

I remain unable to properly articulate this feeling. This feeling of more that hints at a beyond in some weird way. A way that feels collective, but also not at all. I still feel that feeling. When I’m sitting in the shower; mid-way through a ballet class; sitting on a park bench, drunk with my friends — it eats at me all the time. It hasn’t stopped since I visited that intersection seven years ago. I do new things, acquire new hobbies, make new friends, yet constant it remains. And I still can’t tell if I like it.

As the four of us walked out of the gas station, I remember the LED sign next to James Dean’s cut-out: ‘FRESH FUDGE.’ It was flickering over and over through soft clouds of dust; bright yellow as it snapped like glow sticks. I remember watching as pale sunlight fell on the gas pumps and the sky turned a deeper blue. I remember the frost in the air as I stood by the car, and how I paused for a moment before I got back in.

The soft crackle of the radio fell into the moment. Traffic lights glowed red in the square of the intersection. Each road expanded out to nothing. Only mountains were visible far to the right. Big green street signs went dull as we passed them: the speed was at sixty-five. Wires stretched over top, above and across the broken white lines. There was a grit to the highway; dust settled across the car window under rays of cool violet light. I remember glancing at my sister beside me, tapping her hand. She took my palm and squeezed it while our parents chatted in the front seat. She told me she loved me while her head faced toward the window, hair messy with unbrushed kinks. I asked her if she felt any different there, but she just turned and looked at me funny, her face ivory in the early moonlight.

I wondered then why it was only me stuck with that feeling. She was there too, just as I was. And though I’ve asked her about it many times since, she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t remember the feeling that stayed for the rest of the car trip. She doesn’t remember how it took up the seat between her and me.

The stars were milky white in the darkness, baby teeth all shined up. Headlights were bright, streetlights sporadic and dim. Darkness enveloped plains of mottled grass and ‘NO TRESPASSING’ signs with tipping letters we kept passing by. The road invited me into a warm calm that lusted over the intricacies of my mindscape as we sped along the empty roads of California. I remember the feeling coming and going, fading in and out with each slight hill. Remnants of the feeling travelled with me to Big Sur, but they faded on the Golden State Freeway into Los Angeles. I wonder, now, if the feeling is embedded in that place: the place before Los Angeles where everything empties out the side of the mind, and you become filled with a different feeling. A feeling that is perhaps easier to categorise.

17191 CA-46 Suite A, Lost Hills, CA 93249, United States