California
Phantom Planet’s "California" is an objectively dumb song—overdriven guitar, a chorus full of sun-drenched longing for a place that’s mostly a soundstage—and for four years it was the most comforting sound I knew. The moment it started playing, I was home.
Very few things have actually moved me to tears. I hold that line with some pride. But looking back honestly, an embarrassing number of the times I’ve had tears in my eyes happened during The O.C.—Marissa in Tijuana with an empty pill bottle. Ryan sprinting through the door at midnight on New Year’s Eve. The Cohen house standing in ruins. I wasn’t crying at invented events. I was crying because the show had burrowed somewhere I didn’t otherwise know how to access.
Once a week, for an hour, my world simply stopped. Didn’t matter if I’d been gutted at school or chewed up by whatever romantic disaster I was living through at the time or just stranded in the specific boredom of a teenage afternoon. When that song came on, everything recalibrated. The problems were still there. They just didn’t have weight for sixty minutes.
Marissa looked exactly like my ex-girlfriend. Exactly—the hair, the stance, the self-destruction kept within easy reach. I don’t know what to do with that except note it. Sandy I watched with a different kind of longing: he was the father I grew up without, a man who fought for people without making a show of it, who had principles and actually used them, who held his family together through something that looked like love and wisdom both. I couldn’t have that, so I borrowed it once a week from the Cohens. Summer kept surprising me—the directness, the refusal to perform softness she didn’t feel. And Seth and Ryan were my two selves: the one who talked too much and used irony as cover, and the one who expressed himself by walking directly into whatever hurt the most. I knew them both from the inside.
The last episode is coming. I already know I’m not ready.
What I’ll carry from four years with this show is mostly Sandy. Fight for the people you love—actually fight, not just intend to. Don’t spend too long deciding to change something when you could simply change it. Know when to stand above a situation and when to step inside it. And: charisma isn’t charm. It’s conviction. Sandy had both, and I’ve been trying to understand the difference ever since.