There are relationships built out of similarity, and relationships built out of translation. Ours has always felt like the second kind. My husband and I came from neighboring worlds that somehow still needed interpretation.

We both grew up in Los Angeles, but even that sentence means something different for each of us.

His Los Angeles was bounded by Los Angeles County—neighborhoods and freeways and routines that formed a contained map of home, mostly on the Westside. Mine was more sprawling. My version stretched from the San Fernando Valley southward all the way to San Diego. It was less a single city than an entire corridor of movement and family and identity.

To me, Southern California was never divided into separate regions. The drive south was not a transition into somewhere else; it was a continuation. Geography there was not municipal but relational—measured by who lived where, where holidays happened, where grief and celebration gathered.

My mental map of home included hours of freeway, familiar exits, long drives with anticipation already attached to them. San Diego was not a vacation destination. It was part of the same emotional climate as Los Angeles.

For Chaim, San Diego barely existed in his story at all.

There is something disorienting about discovering that a place so central to your identity can be almost absent from someone else’s. The streets, the beaches, the particular landmarks— all of it lived in me as memory, while for him it was mostly blank space. And in reverse, Oregon belonged to him long before it belonged to me.

When I moved to Oregon, I entered a world already shaped by........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)