Today a week ago I was traveling freeway to freeway, smog traffic sunny heat, going inland to the base of the San Gabriel mountains. There is a town there sweet as a nineteen fifties black and white scene. It's surrounded by what looks to me like desert but lush enough for an every Friday night street festival and a flirty furtive smiling crescent moon hung big as the dream of a child in the setting sun sky. Called Monrovia, where, after a gazillion hour drive from Seattle to Eugene to Socal, my friend Paul was after helping his girlfriend move.
That same morning I left my temporary home at Mike's in Newport Beach to move half my stuff in to my room in this sweet little boho home in Huntington Beach, a town away. The other half I tucked between the surfboards and washing machine in Mike's garage, to be moved after my 24-hour marathon trek to Monrovia to see Paul and his lady, then Hollywood to visit my old homeboy from highschool Dave, then Hermosa to chill with Casey from my recent Ocean City life. It was, so to speak, my last hurrah of a seven month grand hurrah called My Independent Gypsy Queen Road Warrior Days.
Weeks earlier, when I was still crashing in Sonoma County in my friend's cottage, I called Erika and unloaded about a month of instinct on her. This was early February and the gist of my emotional out pour was me expressing that my gut was telling me it was time to leave Northern California. I was absolutely fear struck, shrunk and constricted, terrified. I had exactly enough money left to start a new life, create a home of my own somewhere special, but this was such a novel thought next to the open-road lifestyle I'd been living since August. I did not want to pay attention to what my instinct was telling me, what my dreams and emotions were saying. It seemed so foreign, so suffocatingly unknown.
At the end of my download Erika said one thing: Call Mike Wallace. He's lived here in Orange County since 2002, in fact, in my dream journal where I write my heart's goals, there is a note from November 2008 when I left Brandon, our six year relationship, Chestertown, our farm. It says: Beach, Sunny, Warm: walking distance. Volunteer/teach ESL. Write! And then under it, call Mike. This was 2008, November, me a week or so out of my six-year-shoulda-married-the-guy relationship.
My brother, Mike's best friend, called while I was on the other line talking to Erika and he literally said the same thing: Well, did you call Mike? Mike, breezy--Southern California--as he is, was like yea totally, no worries. So that was that. The urgency kicked in then, I followed this pressing movement in my blood to get here as fast as I could, and within 36 hours of my arrival had job and house potentials, both of which came through. I finished my move this past Sunday, started my job Monday, just now got the last of my things: my writing materials unpacked, set-up happily at my desk that came with my room.
Last Friday I was sitting on the freeway in standstill traffic on my way to see Paul. I was tired, eager, a little shook. The windows of my car were all the way down, my hair wild with wind, the sun hard and happy on my face and shoulders. Seven months of on the road, and this was it: I was so ready for them to end. The feeling of my life! About, once more, to begin. Anxious tired and excited, at that moment flooding my car came Scotty Avett from the i-pod scrounging out the opening notes of November Blue. A live version from years ago, a song I haven't randomly heard in years. Now The Avett Brothers, long before they played with Dylan and Mumford and Son on the Grammy's, used to play this little backroom bar in Chestertown we all loved called Andy's. Those boys used to crash out on Bran's old floor on the corner of Kent and High after their shows...
Part of my January-February-passing, the emotions of it, the underlying wateriness really going on when I called Erika, was what it might mean to me to settle in to a home again, like I once had with Brandon and all our family-friends in Ctown. To be happy. And the thing is, the night before I moved out of Mike's to go see Paul, I got a call from Sam, who used to live in that old place with Brandon and Russ on the corner of Kent and High, circa 2001...Sam wanted me to know in case I didn't that Brandon is getting married. I didn't. So hearing that song, a song Brandon and I danced barefoot and happy to in the sidestage grass at Floydfest the year before I left, a song that to this day is my song full of regrets about my failures at love and not being able to stay, well it was Timing. It was like Life saying Listen, no matter what, if you just Listen to your self than I promise you I got this. Just listen, and trust, like you always have.
It feels so good to be home now. Forgiveness, you know? Forgiveness of your self, and what seems bigger than your control. Letting the past, which really means regrets, go. There was a moment that that happened, at Mike's before I moved out. The kind of moment you cant manifest, you just have to let happen. The kind of moment that surprises you because you've been waiting so long on it that you gave up the idea that it would ever really come.
So peaceful and fresh, so good it feels to stop moving. And, to move on. To begin, finally, again.
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