Dispatches from 1022: The Keeper of My Youth

May 2021

Two tiny figures in the back-up camera usher the Tacoma up the driveway.

I stick the truck in park and, out of pure paranoia, lock the emergency brake.

It’s a brand new Tacoma, freshly delivered off COVID back-order with fewer than a thousand miles on the odometer. Jay, a friend and ICU nurse, is the proud owner who generously offered to drive me to Santa Barbara after I totaled my car in the barren Nevada desert. It was my solo road trip across the American West – where I opted to take The Long Way Home – and paid the price. Despite the recent black stain on my driving record, I ask (insist) that I drive – a mark of personal significance to finish the final leg of this dramatic journey in the driver’s seat. Jay cautiously accepts, and, now arrived, scurries to unload what few possessions of mine remain, eager to get back on the road and drive until his truck is no longer under warranty.

The two figures in the back-up camera emerge as life-sized people. Their names are Judith and Greg. Their dog, Enzo, wiggles in the windowsill, impatiently curious at the ruckus in his front yard. Judith is the homeowner who lives in the house in front of the studio I’m subleasing for the summer. She is a fifth-generation Santa Barbaran who inherited the house from her grandmother, and in the same trust, will pass it down to her only son. Greg is her husband, a Midwesterner who migrated west to work with the Navajo Reservation as a nurse. He has since retired, and spends his time performing handyman tasks, sifting through an ambitious reading list, and battling late stage cancer. His calmness contrasts Judith’s exuberance. Together, they counterbalance.

The house, one a realtor might call “charming” with “good bones” and “great potential” is on the east side of Santa Barbara. The east side is largely inhabited by working class families, generations-old homeowners who bought their homes at the footsteps of the foothills for pennies on the dollar, and now sit on seven-figure plots. With the possibility of putting up a For Sale sign and redeeming generational wealth few have known, the neighborhood is changing hands at a quick-pace. Families squish together and clog limited street parking. Freshly renovated homes with contemporary façades mash crudely against chainlink fences with guard dogs. This aesthetic hodgepodge divides clear lines between “us” and “them”. I’m neither. I’m just an alien arrived in a Tacoma-shaped space ship, staying for three months in a place where I know virtually nobody.

As we unload each item, an excessive array of questions and comments swirl– What is that? Where is it from? That’s a lot of camera gear. Is there more? Do you use it?

I make an effort to respond to every line of dialogue and generate friendly rapport, but I am tired. My nose is broken and my shoulder is torn. I’ve not been alone for three days, and the entire road trip, for weeks on end, I’ve envisioned this victorious finish line of a treasured solo studio in a place I’ve dreamt of living since I first visited: Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara. It’s where cool kids of incomprehensible privilege lived and surfed better than the rest of us. It’s where purple mountains met a deep blue sea, rimmed by a swath of islands on the southern horizon. It’s a place nestled inside itself, a sort of topographical self-preservation and shield of protection for those lucky enough to negotiate a piece of earth on the fabled American Riviera.

Santa Barbara had a hell of a ring to it.

Santa Barbara was exactly where I was supposed to be.

After a year away – a challenging Portuguese winter submerged in big waves; an angry Arizona spring learning how to throw and take a punch; and a personal trip searching for solace and self-confrontation on the road —I’ve returned to California.

I am lucky to even be in my own body. I know this, and it makes what little I have left materially utterly irrelevant. In the bank account of life, I’ve accrued significant interest in one radical story after another. With two feet on terra firma, I want to address these head-on, and do the one thing I can always do with very little: be still and write.

Inside the studio is the furniture of the woman, Sam, from whom I’m subletting. She left a bed, a standing desk, various kitchen appliances, and a handful of other practical items.

The front door opens into the kitchen, which is surprisingly sizable and thoroughly stocked for such a small space. Past the stove top and refrigerator is another entryway into the main room, a golden-lighted bedroom. Wooden floors and soft yellow paint warms the room with a rich glow. A French door leads to a private patio which overlooks the garden.

Judith explains that the garden — filled to the brim with native plants, fruit trees, roses, and herb boxes— was once covered in four thick inches of concrete. She and Greg spent the better part of a decade rehabilitating the topsoil, and nurturing an abundant garden of year-round harvest, with pollinators, birds, and critters both big and microscopic co-habiting this sanctuary. Behind the garden is another building, which includes Judith’s tap dance, painting, and ceramics studio.

The patio is framed by a prolific rose bush and a tree drooping low from the weight of its own fruit. The tree has two large bulges on its thicker branches, and I realize it’s growing apricots on one side and plums on the other.

“It’s grafted,” Judith tells me, “meaning we added a different plant species to another and now it grows two fruits. You may have as many as you like.”

I picture my morning ritual gorging myself on stone fruit from my own backyard, and know this is just the first sign of magic in an enclave of more to come.

To the left of the French door is the bathroom, with a full-sized bathtub and abundant natural light. Dangling over the window is a crystal ball, catching sun beams and ricocheting rainbows. There is an undeniable and overwhelmingly unique aesthetic here – each detail hand-picked by someone who has had a life-long love affair with beauty.

A summer sublease, at first, felt like the right rollover period, the right amount of soft-footed commitment to my perpetual lack of commitment before I fling myself into, well, the next thing. 

After all, I am young and quite possibly considered reckless. Twenty-four with a shitty driving record, a list of world travels longer than my arm, an appetite for adrenaline, and a propensity to fall in love with the wrong big wave surfer(s). In an era of my life where I’ve gotten used to full immersion followed by abrupt dis-attachment, I’ve trained myself to believe that the infinite potential of what could happen next is far more interesting than what’s already passed.

But now, standing inside this place, three months is not nearly enough. I am in an unfamiliar state of whole-body stillness. Something about this studio, something about all I was beginning to know in Santa Barbara, felt like I needed more than a season to uncover what was buried here. Or, at the very least, not waste a moment, grab a shovel, and start digging. 

Four Months Later

I lean my head against the window of a bus from Baltimore to Newport, Rhode Island. Five states in seven hours. The skyline of Manhattan filters through the suspension on the bridge. I am untethered – again – and trying not to dwell too much on what won’t change.

Of course I tried.

I scoured Craigslist, Marketplace, Zillow, Apartments.com. I asked everyone. I prayed. Santa Barbara’s prohibitively expensive real estate eludes an independent filmmaker at the beginning of their career, and is in direct violation of the low overhead I’m obligated to maintain. After losing a $1,000 deposit to a Facebook Marketplace scam, I am still licking the wound, and trying to think of anything but how I long to be back.

And yet – memories seep through the cracks: the bleached blonde strands in my hair curl at the ends like an open palm. A hair dye earned from daily dips in the ocean and surfing multiple times a day (or night, under a full moon). I think of the new group of friends who will stick with me for life, and the flashback of a certain someone who loves big waves and Pistachio Ice Cream.

I think of psychedelics and simplicity. The way I walked and biked absolutely everywhere and squeezed the slowness out of each moment. The way for the first time in my life, I felt like the right age at the right time, indulging without abandon in the small window that is my own youth. This alone, I came to learn, could be its own purpose.

Now, freshly 25, the story I'm telling myself is that these things can’t last forever.

Ahead of me is three months of travel - ten states, two countries. Unmoored again, I’ve placed a custom order for two surfboards with a half-assed plan to wander Central America. It’s a game I'm trying to play forever – the one where I keep going so nothing catches up. 

But I can feel the toll it’s taking. I can feel the difference in my bones where the perpetual motion no longer satiates something deeper. Living out of a suitcase, with no privacy, no rituals, and lots of obligations, makes me yearn to be still, to be stable, to be back in Santa Barbara.

Home is where your bookshelf is.
Home is where you can cook a meal.
Home is where you can strike a match. Light a candle. 
Home is where you are, each time you open the door. 

Santa Barbara was like the new lover who enthusiastically hands you the keys in a me casa es su casa agreement. A fast-paced, free-falling romance. But if you denied her generosity, if you went looking somewhere else, the door would slam shut on your fingers. The curtains would draw closed. The pleading letters would be returned to sender. She would recoil herself from you, and make it nearly impossible to find a way back in.

The Manhattan skyline disappears and is replaced by the monotony of industrial New England. I wiggle lower in my seat, adjusting my posture to induce sleep. My eyelids blink heavily a few times. I feel my phone buzz in my pocket but am too stoned with exhaustion to look. I drift off, unaware that the message that’s just come through is from none other than Judith:

Sam bought a house in Washington.
She’s moving out in December.
The studio is yours if I want it.
x

December 2021

The mornings all start the same – a pot of tea and prayers of devotion to the walls around me.

My parents divorced when I was four. I moved a dozen times before I was 18, then half-a-dozen or more places after that. I’d become used to not getting used to things, but now, for the first time as an adult, I have the exhilarating and debilitating task of choosing which furniture and decor to commit to.

So far the only decision I made is to hang one of my new surfboards over the bed. My mom insists it’s a bad idea in case there’s an earthquake.

“T'es fouelle?! (Are you crazy?!) It could fall and smash you while you sleep—allahehfad! (God forbid!)” she frets in her typical trifecta of French, English, and Arabic. But it looks good up there, and I don't have much else, so it’s a risk I’m willing to take. (Weeks later, she will send me a book, FENG SHUI FOR A BETTER LIFE, with certain passages underlined, just to drive home the point.)

Despite the bare walls and relatively barren room, I am happy to slowly settle in. I want to take time finding my footing, testing my taste, and absorbing the details of this ecosystem as we gradually fuse.

For example: there’s the squeaks in the attic each night, which Judith assures me is a family of possums. She says they’re good for the environment - natural pest controllers - and I sweetly interpret each squeak as playful banter between a mama and her babies. Months later, I will learn these weren’t possums after all, but an infestation of a large colony of rats feasting on the floorboards.

Then of course, there’s the clockwork of Judith and Greg’s routines, which in turn define my own. At dawn, Judith heads to her tap dance studio. The sounds of her clacking heels in accordance with the chorus of crows stirs me awake with regularity. I don’t mind – I love to wake up early. It’s time used to create a steady ritual around writing. I’ve begun a novel. In the mornings I organize my thoughts with sobriety, but in the evenings, alone, high on silence and solitude, I write in feverish scrawls.

The only one who knows is Enzo (the dog) who, at any opportunity, lunges for my patio door, sniffs like a maniac, and begs to be let in else he’ll blow my cover. Rarely do I give in, but to make it up to him, I take him on beach walks and tell him he’s a good boy.

Then there’s Greg, in his monk-like quietude, doing laundry on Sundays and Thursdays. He hangs each item with delicate care on the clothing line, and sometimes, if the mood strikes and I’m on the patio, we discuss the latest in what we’re both reading or watching. On rare occasion I’d commit the cardinal sin and forget the holy days of week— absentmindedly tossing my own laundry in the machine when it wasn’t my turn. A stern lecture followed by indefinite silent treatment was guaranteed, and my laundry never quite cleaned.

There’s the gardening, of course. The new bursts of winter harvest - apples, clementines, artichokes - now that the apricot tree has gone to bed. Judith cooks according to the seasons and regularly leaves me a bowl of homemade soup or pastries on my kitchen table. She’s started calling herself my “Fairy Godmother”, and enjoys dropping little gifts off when I least expect it. With a true godmother’s intuition, she seems to always know when I could use a little reminder that someone is watching and cares. For this, I am eternally grateful.

As I learn their schedules, I suit them to my convenience - that is, if I am or am not in the mood to be caught in a conversation about art or politics or neighborhood gossip indefinitely. I time my entrances and exits with an exactitude to each person’s agenda, and have learned the topography of the driveway so well, I can tip-toe the quietest route with the fewest crinkling leaves so not even Enzo detects a peep.

But sometimes I get it wrong.

Like the time I came home early to find Judith giving Enzo a bath in my bathroom. Or the time I misjudged her departure for school and started playing music too early. Knock knock knock. Shit – not now. I pretended not to hear, but she came around the side hoping to find me on the patio. I hid in the bathroom. Flushed the toilet. Pretended to be “indisposed”. It was a choreography that together we perfected through years of practice.

This was “The Judith Tax” – a fee of time I exchanged for paying below market rent. It wasn’t so bad, and actually most times, enjoyable, but it was out of my control and often uninvited. There were just simply some days I couldn’t help but need to be home, in my cocoon, resolutely removed and utterly uninterrupted from the rest of the world.

And yet, on the whole, things were good. Better than good. There were days when life unfolded so beautifully in a mere 250 square feet, I could barely be motivated to go outside. I invited friends over often, but mostly, cherished being alone. I was teaching myself how to cook advanced meals, chopping and mixing organic ingredients over the stovetop for hours on end. I built a compost bin in the backyard and brought home my first pets – earthworms – whom I fed daily.

In this love story between myself and the studio, I was deeply curious to discover what kind of person I was on steady ground. I felt like the architect of my own coming of age, and gradually, was designing an ecosystem that enabled me to catch up to the curve of my own transformation.

My Fairy Godmother and her stunning artwork.

December 2022 (One Year Later)

I am barefoot on the cold kitchen tile, skimming my near-empty refrigerator for possibilities.

For the past six months, I’ve rarely been home, instead spending most of my time in Ojai at a new boyfriend’s place. My studio, my most treasured sanctuary, has been gravely neglected. It doesn’t feel like home anymore. In part, I am embarrassed by it. Embarrassed at its modesty (especially in comparison to his place). Embarrassed that there is so much evidence of my own youth (especially in comparison to his age). I am so far gone in fervid love that I am constantly adjusting myself to suit his preferences. There is an underlying feeling of a perpetual test to pass. I don’t even realize the extent to which I’ve changed.

My phone rings. It’s him. He’s arrived at his hotel in Manhattan for a commercial shoot before he flies to Arizona to be with me for Christmas. But there’s something new in his voice— something that makes me shut the refrigerator to cut the cold air. I take my phone off speaker and cautiously hold it up to my ear.

He’s read my letter. He tells me he has struggled to respond, but now he knows – absolutely for certain – that his heart just isn’t in it. His tone feels remarkably casual. Like his heart was something he simply forgot to pack, and was giving me a courtesy head’s up that he left it behind. He tells me that even though he loves me so much, it's imperative we must end all communication, effective immediately.

Right away, I say nothing. I reach for the Polaroids of us in Guam I hung just days before on the fridge. Instinctively, I bury them in a drawer. Doing my best to maintain composure, I thank him for his honesty and hang up.

Two weeks later, I return to Santa Barbara. I’ve spent the whole drive in the rain, unaware that this California winter will be the longest, darkest, coldest, and wettest on record. In two weeks I’ve lost ten pounds. My pants, no longer taut to my hips, sag as I exit my car. I leave my things, stumble inside, and collapse on my bed.

A knock on the door. It’s Judith. No part of me wants to answer. She knocks again, and says a package has arrived. Begrudgingly, I take immense effort to get up and open the door. Judith stands holding a big brown box and flashes a happy-to-see-me smile. “It’s from —,” she chirps, naïve anything’s changed.

Hearing his forbidden name pierces straight through. Pain shoots through my body. The ground cracks open. I fall through. Clutching my stomach, I drop to the floor, sobbing. Judith rushes in and drapes herself around me.

“What’s wrong?!” she panics, “What’s happened?!”

I can’t speak. I just shake and cry.

She lifts me to the bedroom and helps me sit down. She says I need tea, and goes back into her kitchen to fetch it.

A piping cup of black tea re-emerges and Judith makes sure I gulp a few sips down. The hot liquid sears my esophagus. It is the first thing I’ve consumed all day and lands in my empty stomach with a punch.

She flips on the heater, puts a blanket around me, and sits down next to me. She wants the story. The full story.

A dam bursts. Words pour. I tell her the story - the whole story. I spare no detail. She listens, her poker face revealing nothing. I keep talking, revisiting the same ins-and-outs of a narrative that’s driven me utterly insane in the past two weeks – each part combed with such excruciating concentration, determined to find the crack, the clue, the single most important detail that will explain to me how everything could change so abruptly and leave me feeling like the smallest, most insignificant person in the world.

I get it all out — every word — until I’ve nothing left to say. I take in a deep, shaky breath. The tea is cold, but I lift it to my lips anyway and gulp down the rest. I look up at Judith, waiting for her reaction.

“Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him.

Return To Sender immediately.”

Her colorful language shocks me.

“What…?”

“I said: Return To Sender i-m-m-e-d-i-a-t-e-l-y.”

“What do you mean Return To Sender? The package?”

“Yes, the package. Get it out of here. As long as it’s in this room with you, he’s in this room with you. You need to get it out of here.”

“But… shouldn’t I see what’s inside it first?”

“Why? What’s the point? There is nothing he can give to you or say to you that can change what he has done to you. It could be filled with solid gold. It doesn’t matter. He has shown you who he really is: a coward. Now he’s trying to be a hero. Look what it’s doing to you! Believe me when I tell you: nothing he can give to you is worth having anymore.”

I sit stunned. Simply stunned.

“Hmm,” I muster. “I think I’ll go for a walk… think it over…”

“No,” she insists, “You can’t do that. You need to go now, before your walk. Otherwise you’ll talk yourself out of it. You’ll open the box out of sheer curiosity. You will put yourself right back in this state.”

Something rang deeply true about what she was saying, but I was stuck buffering the sheer magnitude of this proposition. Simply return the box? I didn’t even realize that was an option.

Judith opens my closet door and pulls out my jacket.

“Put this on. Go wash your face. And go do it right now.”

Listening to her, I lift the box, buckling under its ludicrously heavy weight.

It could be filled with solid gold I think to myself.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Judith offers.

“No,” I say, “Thank you, but I will do it and then go for a walk. I’ll see you when I get back.”

“Okay,” she says.

I drive to the post office and endure lifting the cumbersome box one final time. I plop it on the counter and defiantly request to Return To Sender. The woman places the box on the scale — it’s almost 30 pounds.

“What’s inside?” she mumbles through a mouthful of chewing gum.

“Uh…” I hesitate, unsure what to say.

“Any lithium ion batteries?”

“Um… no, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know? Well, I can’t ship it if you don’t know. I’ll have to open it to find out.”

I panic – no, under NO circumstances can she possibly open the box. Rushed for a solution, I blurt - “Gold. There’s solid gold inside.”

She looks at me in humorless disbelief.

“Do you want insurance?”

“No thanks.”

She rolls her eyes, blows a bubble with her chewing gum, and pops it as she types. The squeaky sound of packing tape stretches over the new shipping label and she tells me what I owe. I pay the small fortune, pondering if while I’m at it, I should send him a Venmo request too.

The box is whisked away and out of sight forever. Right away, I feel two feet taller.

Inside the studio, Judith left me a bowl of hot, homemade soup and a slice of chocolate cake with a note that reads:

Listen to Return To Sender by Elvis.
Love you!
Xo,
Your Fairy Godmother

I pop open a bottle of wine. I put on the song. I slurp every last drop of soup, devour every morsel of chocolate, and start dancing around the kitchen. I can’t help but burst into fits of wicked, uncontrollable laughter each time I imagine him realizing the box came back. I play the song over and over, twirling around my studio with a glass of wine in hand.

I am delighted to be home.

May 2024

Emily clambers barefoot up the apricot tree. There are fewer fruits than ever this year and the few worth trying for are nearly impossible to reach. Impressively, she manages to grab two, then reverses prudently over each limb and back down to the patio.

“I can’t believe you have a freaking apricot tree dude!”

She sinks her teeth into the soft flesh. Juice dribbles down her chin.

“Yeah– it didn’t really fruit much this year. The last three summers it’s been so prolific. I think the weather confused it.”

Our last two winters have been endurance challenges for the California climate – darker, wetter, colder, and longer than anything we’re used to. It’s an observation of a new climate reality that’s disrupted the cycles of everything. But I need not explain that to Emily – she is a working Marine Biologist and PhD student at Scripps. She is one of the smartest people I know, passionate about saving the planet and all life inside it, feral in every way, and my best friend.

Later today, I will take her to the river and spend almost an hour combing through her knotted blonde hair - unwashed and unbrushed for god knows how long. I will chop off her split ends and tease out every knot until her hair falls like silk across her bronzed shoulders. We will bake in hot sun and swim naked in cold water. We will laugh and we will cry. She will share the story of someone who broke her heart – badly. I will listen and try to take some of the pain away. The very least you can do for a girl with a broken heart is brush her hair by the river.

Now she sits at my kitchen table, face scrunched over a book I’ve loaned her, chewing on the end of a pencil. I cook breakfast - vegan gourmet this and that. When I place the plates on the table it wiggles. I lean down to re-adjust the pebble under the short leg, stabilizing it.

“You know,” she says, glancing up from the book, “you should write a list of all the details of this place. The pebble under the table, for example. Judith. Greg. All the peculiarities. They’re so special.”

I smile at this suggestion and think about it for a moment. She’s right – I should. I don’t know it yet, but soon I will leave this place. I am beginning to think about it seriously. Emily’s suggestion sets off a chain reaction, immediately, I start to take note of everything I want to remember.

There’s the wooden table we’re sitting at, which I found on the side of the road and sanded down to reveal a new skin. Its folding-flaps on either side remind me of when I lived on a sailboat. I take in the collage of photographs arranged on the fridge and the recipes of meals I still plan to cook. There’s the fiddle leaf fig which has grown preposterously tall since I first brought it home. A blue guitar and a well-loved record player. There’s a collection of maps and sailing charts covering nearly every inch of wall space – evidence (I tell myself) of a past life as a cartographer. There’s the time capsule Judith hid behind the vanity in the bathroom. There’s the enduring surfboard above the bed.

There’s the way I can close my eyes and tell you what time of day or day of the week it is based on the songs of the birds, the heinous leaf blower (Tuesday, 10am), or Judith’s tap dancing. There’s the kick in the heater as it croaks to life in winter and the whirring of the ceiling fan all summer.

There’s the moments in time I freeze forever in my memory – the meals shared with friends, the sleepovers, the projector movie nights. The long hug and gentle kiss someone left on my forehead when he brought me home after a concert. How we stood in my kitchen, awkwardly delaying our goodbye, until he reached over, aware of my fragile state, my broken heart, and cloaked me in his warm, protective embrace.

This single embrace would lay the foundation of my next evolution and eventual pull away from the studio. He would become the person I’d rely on in my brightest and darkest moments. Like the time my film got funding, or when I found out my best friend in Portugal killed herself. That rain or shine, night or day, good or bad, his arms were always open and his compassionate presence, always constant. He was my new refuge. My new sense of safety. Of joy. Of homecoming.

Chapters of our life story come and go before we even realize we’re in one. For four formative years, this studio cradled my youth. It’s where I could unwind in the safety of my own nest, punch a time card of my own volition, and be selfishly indulgent in the deliciousness of my own company.

But now things were changing again – someone blew into my life, merged into my lane, and together, we were expanding. The studio, as much as I wanted to hold on to it, as much as it would always remain the keeper of my youth, only had room for one.

Now that the apricot tree wasn’t fruiting, I had a strong feeling Emily was right: it was time to take stock, it was time to give thanks, but more importantly, it was time to let go.