Sunday, August 11, 2024

Summer Vaca 2024

I wish I was just a regular feeler. 

But it’s hard for me to be in the middle of most feelings when life is just so hugely happy that your whole entire head smiles, and it's so freaking hard that in moments you can't fathom moving on, and so over the top amazing that it feels like a drug, and sometimes so heart bleedingly sorrowful that it hurts to breathe. 

It's no wonder most people will do anything- including self destructive things to avoid feeling feelings.

I was excited as I packed our family for Hermosa Beach, a beautiful beachfront city in Los Angeles, California. A place I called home until right after Greyson's First birthday. Greyson has been asking to go for months now- "First Hermosa Beach, then hotel pool and hot tub" he declared multiple times daily. Apparently his trifecta of perfectness, and a place we've visited every Summer since we moved away. "I heard you are going on a trip?" One of his Teaching assistants asked on our last day of Summer school, reciting the trifecta that everyone in Summer school apparently also had memorized. "We haven't booked anything- but I guess we have to now!" I declared. So we did.

Our travel day, complete with a 3:45am wake up call, and multiple air ports sucked every ounce of energy and caffeine I had in my body. The now, two hour time difference was foreign.



On our first morning in Hermosa, I woke up before the sun rose and was anchored down by an unexpected heaviness. I was hungry and exhausted and empty, and despite wanting to stay in bed, I knew I needed to walk to the beach instead. The beach can cure everything- right? I snuck around in the dark room as to not wake anyone, got dressed and headed out.

I walked towards the pull of the ocean with tears going down my face, I couldn't stop them if I had tried (and I did). This emotion in this location felt so foreign. I felt foreign. My life didn't feel like mine. I wish I had known that adults get sad and confused and don’t always know what to do because i thought I’d have everything figured out at this stage when I was a kid.

Last I lived here, I had a one year old baby. And now I have sciatica. Where did the time go from then until now? 

I  forgot my sun glasses and my hat, so I just cried out into the open. That's ok, everything's normal in Los Angeles. 

Most people slap a picture on Instagram declaring the beach, "My happy place", but I couldn't stop aching and sniffling, wiping away tears with my head down. Living in Missouri feels so so far away from Los Angeles now. It's like Hermosa doesn't even belong to me anymore. How does this exist every day and I'm not there to experience it? I don’t know how to be here and not live here. Even though I don’t want to live here anymore. So many feelings that couldn't fit under my skin so they leaked out my eyes.


I'm pretty certain Heaven will feel like the beach before the rest of the world wakes up. I felt the sun rise from the pier every morning we were there. 

People often ask me - Don’t you miss California? 

The real answer? An irrevocable, pound my fist across my chest kind of yes. But the truth is- I deeply miss everywhere I’ve lived- I miss how I feel when a place truly feels like home in my soul. I missed Springfield Missouri, my home for the 5 1/2 years it took me to graduate college. I missed St. Louis, Missouri when I moved to Los Angeles in 1999. I missed Hermosa Beach when we moved to Fresno, in the Central Valley of California in 2010. And I miss Fresno now with a herculean weight on my chest. I just want to hold tight to all the places I’ve loved in a basket and carry it with me everywhere I go. But I can’t because it’s too heavy, so here the tears of the ghost of past me fall down my face as I walk the strand by the Pacific Ocean. I listened to the Counting Crows as I walked...

And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings. The Counting Crows, Mrs. Potters Lullaby

I cried because sometimes we have to move on from the people and things that we still deeply love. We don't just stop loving them. I cried because I realized I loved all the me’s that lived there too- even if I didn’t know it at the time. 

Some are the same, but so many of the places have changed as I walk on the pier. I remember when it all was so familiar. Every crack in the sidewalk on my nightly run back home. You think you will never forget the details, but you do. And as a feeler and a writer- the details make up my life. So it felt like my life was slipping away right now. 

It took me a couple of days to move through this sadness. Luckily I could still feel all the beauty.










Grey got Beach, Pool and hot tub daily. It's a pretty good schedule if you ask me.




In life, we want the drugs but we don’t want the side effects. We want to worship the sun but don't want sun spots or cancer. We want the wave but not the waiting when it comes to surfing. We celebrate the love but not the loss. But life is not ala cart, and everything good has a cost. 

My heart finally came around. What a gorgeous gift: to have lived here and experienced it all. Los Angeles has a magic that I just can't explain. The nostalgia turns from a chokehold to a comforting hug. Life is a process of letting go, of moving forward, a process of creating new to fill old holes, and a process of embracing what you have, not what you miss. 


Author Yann Martel, (Think Life of Pi), wrote, "I suppose in the end, the whole of life becomes an act of letting go, but what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye".

So, with fresh tears and a new perspective I say, Goodbye (for now) Hermosa Beach, I will never stop loving you. 

EPILOGUE: It was nice to see the things about Los Angeles I didn't love: fresh puke on the street due to someone who had one too many shots the night before, common place car chases on the news, the road rage- where people don't hesitate to lay on their horn for a minute straight, and the weirdo asshole who said to Parker, "Get the F away from me dude", to 13 year old PARKER at the airport, and then proceeded to tell me to S his D when I told him where to shove it. 

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