Dorian decided he was a Sacramento guy sometime around March. He announced this the way people announce a personality renovation — with a certain blankness in the eyes that means they've already committed and facts will not be entertained. He had moved here in February. He had eaten at one taco truck. He had, at some point, listened to a podcast about the grid system. This was apparently enough.
The poppies were his idea.
"Fremont Park is doing this whole thing," he said, scrolling his phone on Saturday night, already building the case. "Giant illuminated poppies, it's like, sculptural. Very Sacramento. I want to show you Sacramento." He said the word Sacramento the way people say it after they've decided to love a place — with a little extra weight, like he was introducing me to a friend he'd made.
It was 82 degrees by noon and getting less apologetic about it.
The poppies were, genuinely, stunning. Enormous poppy sculptures in full bloom, the park doing its beautiful Midtown-in-May thing — people laid out on blankets, someone selling ceramics under a canopy, the Second Saturday energy bleeding into Sunday like it hadn't fully clocked out. I would have been happy to stand there for twenty minutes and then find iced coffee.
Dorian had a plan.
"There's a patio," he said. "I know a patio. It's a surprise." He said it with the confidence of a man who had read one Instagram caption from six weeks ago. We walked. We walked past the patio. I saw the patio. I said "is that the patio?" He said "no, mine's better."
His was closed.
"It might have just opened," he offered. "They're probably doing a soft launch." He checked the door handle to confirm. It did not open. He nodded at this information and absorbed it and did not let it change anything.
We were now, according to my phone, walking the wrong direction. I mentioned this. He said we weren't, technically, going the wrong direction — we were just approaching the car "from a different angle." I want you to understand that he believes this. He said it with no cruelty and no irony and the complete inner peace of someone who has decided 2026 is his 2016, which he also said, verbatim, in the car earlier that morning. "I'm in my confidence era," he told me over the freeway. I said I didn't know what that meant. He said it meant he was trusting his instincts more. I said okay.
The Marysville thing was its own chapter.
We were trying to get back to the freeway. There are cones. There are many cones. There is a lane reconfiguration situation that I had read about and mentioned, gently, twice, and that Dorian had acknowledged with the specific energy of someone who hears you but has already committed to another theory. "I know a shortcut," he said. "I drove through here in April."
April.
We sat in the shortcut for eleven minutes. Dorian was very serene. He had the radio on. He found the light at the intersection, when it finally changed, to be genuinely beautiful. "See," he said, which didn't mean anything, but he said it anyway, with so much warmth that I couldn't even locate the argument I'd been building.
He bought me a cold brew at the next stop without being asked. He mispronounced the name of the neighborhood where it was located and then, when I corrected him, said "yeah, that's what I said" with total sincerity. He told the person behind the counter that he was "pretty much a local now." The person behind the counter said "cool." Dorian seemed genuinely moved.
Here is what I know about Dorian: he is not a Sacramento guy. He is going to be, eventually, through sheer repetition and the city just accepting him because he shows up so enthusiastically. But right now he is a man who read about a park installation and turned it into a full expedition, navigated by vibes and outdated memory, in eighty-two degree dry heat, with the focused joy of someone who has decided confidence is a personality trait you can just start doing.
He was wrong about every single turn.
He kept reaching over and pointing at things and telling me what they were called.
I'm going back next weekend. He's already planning the route.