On Going Home
We’d booked two nights at an Econo Lodge in Leucadia, CA, the little beachside town I grew up in, and we had no idea what we were doing next. We’d been offered couches in San Francisco and Portland, and we were still trying to decide if we wanted to couchsurf up the coast and commit to driving our bank accounts into the ground, or turn around and drive home to New York.
It was storming when we arrived, but I rolled down the windows and gulped the air in, imagining that even despite the rain I might be able to taste the salt on my tongue.
Not even ten minutes after we checked in, my friend Diana (who helped raise me and is essentially my grandmother), appeared at our door, announced that two nights just wasn’t enough, and got us another night in the room. Okay, we thought. Looks like we’ll be here for three nights.
Outside, the wind beat at the trees and rattled the windows, and I wondered what I’d signed us up for.
When we woke up the next morning we pulled back the curtains and discovered a quintessentially beautiful Leucadia morning. I’m talking bright blue skies and blooming flowers and irritatingly attractive people walking their perfect dogs.
We squinted into the sun like mole people and drove to have breakfast with Diana in the same tiny diner she’s been going to for 25 years, which she used to take me and my brother to when we were still tiny and tow-headed, and as we sipped our first cups of coffee and began to wake up, California started to sneak into our bones.
We went to the beach, trying to remember if we enjoyed the beach. We picked up shiny rocks. We went to a coffee shop I’d spent my childhood in, and the smell of the place yanked me back to 1996 like it was a time-jumping bungee cord.
Later, as we were eating burritos and cracking ourselves up with my friends Beth and Daniel, who are more family to me than most of my family, I paused to look around the room and I realized that Katie, my newest surrogate family member, somehow fit in seamlessly with my old family — my original family — like she’d always known them.
It’s a strange thing to go back, especially since I haven’t lived there since I was seven, because somehow the place still feels like it’s mine. The streets feel familiar under my bare feet; the people are the family I spent most of my life wanting, but never really realized I’ve always had.
We had an inexplicably hard time leaving, so for a while we just didn’t.
Instead, we sat in our favorite coffee shop and wrote, and we walked on the beach and collected shiny rocks, and we spent time with friends and forgot to take pictures. In the end we stayed a week, and would have stayed longer if the money hadn’t been running out, and even after we said our goodbyes to our friends and our coffeeshop, and after we watched the sun set for the last time over the Pacific, we were still asking “Couldn’t we just stay one more day?”
We left early in the morning on Super Bowl Sunday, and we listened to Tom Waits’ album Closing Time, and even though I’d left this place before — so many times I can barely count — it felt this time that I was leaving something crucial behind, like I’d forgotten to pack up a part of me.
We’re almost home now, and when we get to Brewster tonight we’ll reunite with our families and our animals and our friends, and we'll try to get jobs.
We’ll fall back into our patterns and go to our usual haunts, and after a while the air will warm up and we’ll pack up our winter coats and I’ll finally stop complaining about the cold.
I’ll work in the garden with my dad, and it’ll be nice.
But somewhere, deep inside me, I’ll be dreaming of driving back West (with a thoroughly Thelma and Louise-esque detour around Tennessee), and when I get off Highway 5 in Encinitas I’ll roll down the windows and feel the salty air in my lungs, and I’ll be home again.
