Free Write 8: Soulmates

I want to think I know what I’m talking about when I say or type this word, and yet I can’t. I wanted a more elegant approach, and now I’m not going to get it because I already started the timer. I don’t know what I think of this word anymore, because it’s meant a lot of things. For a while it was the end all be all. The holy grail of relationships. If I found my soulmate, or the one, then I’d be set for life, or at the very least, succeeded at one of the life’s tasks. But I haven’t found this person. Or maybe I found this in a lot of people at one time.

There was a man, a beautiful man I was in love with. He had green eyes, and a smooth voice and was one of the few people on Earth blessed enough to look better without clothes then with them, but my love or like for him wasn’t good enough. He moved on, I think, and for a while it felt illicit to ever think of him, because it was a whirlwind of other emotions. The intensity of the emotion that I shared for him, that he returned, and yet I can’t think of anything else besides how much he hurt me, and how foolish I felt. But we started speaking again and now I’m not sure. I feel a little better thinking about him, but still foolish. I had felt some sort of oneness with him, you know, the way you’re supposed to feel about soulmates, that one person who’s there for you, but it didn’t work. It all failed, and now, now I’m wondering, does this stuff ever work?

There have been others. A girl whose hair I loved to run my fingers through then laugh whenever they got stuck, but she was the lover of many because she couldn’t be the lover of one, and 0ften, I was never the many or the one. Or there were potential crushes that never went anywhere on coworkers and classmates and hallmates, and…whenever I think about how many crushes I’;ve had I sound like a romance addict, like I’m one of those people who pursues t he emotion rather than the person. That’s what my first love said to me before he slammed the phone in my ear, and I’m left to think, is it so wrong to chase things instead of people? People run away too, but at least there’s this pure goal, that’s pure because hey, no one’s messed it up for you yet. Maybe that’s why I want to run a marathon one of these days.

The weird thing about this concept, is that it’s one of t hose things where I only apply it to people I’m not romantically involved with. The only people I’ve called my lovers were my friends, because in some way our friendship was so pure it surpassed that type of love that’s messy and impulsive, and what we had was so quiet, so pure, so gentle that I knew I could always return to it. It was my safe place. The trouble is that people aren’t particularly safe, so why spread this life of the soulmate around? I think they kinda suck and it sets us up for failure. I’d like to think there might be a moment, in the back of my foolish mind, where I might meet that one person who likes the same things, the same needs, the sames desires in the same strength as I do, but I know it’s never going to happen, but I can hope right? But until then, maybe I’ll never have a soulmate. Maybe like seven. And maybe, I’ll never have that one person who’s unattainable because those people are like dieties, who are supposed to not be touched, because they’ll ruin you with how radiantly destructively beautiful they are. And maybe a hobby will just have to be enough for a while.

I want, I want, I want. Why do I want so much? Why can’t I be happy with some complacency? Why does this process of thinking there is someone out there for me in some capacity, hurt and surprise and captivate me so much?

Damn. I wanted this to sound prettier.

Oceanside, 2007

“Don’t you consider Oceanside to be the second place you’re from?” Carisha asked me as we walked along the beach in the August evening. We met up because I was moving to Oakland and she was still in L.A., but we had four glorious short months six thousand miles away in London. She had taken me out for my birthday on this occasion, and the night before she had asked me about what I wanted for my birthday. I was 23 and a recent college grad, uncertain about my move, and the job that paid very little. I was so unsure about everything that I said my two new favorite words the night before on the phone: “Surprise me,” I had said, as I lied across my mother’s bed in the unusually muggy night. The air didn’t stir, or blow, or break: it was just still that week in her house. San Diego had reached a heat wave, as much as a heat wave that can be reached there with the high being 96. The highs in Riverside were in the triple digits during their summers, but I had looked forward to those windy days in North County. If the wind changed, I somehow thought I could change my mind, or there was still movement in the world from something invisible. But when I ran my three miles, or cooked eggplant parmesan, or slept on my mother’s leather couch, with the unmovable heat sticking me to it, it felt like everything was standing still, and maybe I should, and not move, and stay somewhere.

But Carisha were on the beach, about twenty steps away from the Oceanside Pier, and she’s joking around with me about how much I’ve changed since we first met. I’m wearing earrings, a coral tank top and a floral pink A-line skirt, the same outfit I wore at my commencement. That outfit’s worlds away from my hat, t-shirt and sneakers uniform from London. Now, Carisha’s in black leggings and a red tunic, looking like the typical L.A. girl, a career woman on the weekend, because that’s who she’s become. We both wander around the Oceanside pier, talking about our career paths since we talked our loves to death at dinner over chardonnay. I tell her I went to Oceanside High School, which I thought I had told her earlier, but she raises her eyebrow in envy as she stares at the white sunset over the clear water. I don’t consider it to be where I’m from though. I never tell people I’m from Oceanside, I’ve told a boy at a poetry reading, a girl I’ve volunteered with and my teachers I’m from Chicago, not because it sounds interesting, because I didn’t feel like I was from Oceanside. I moved to Oceanside with my mom when I was fourteen, because I liked the weather, and she was trying to run away from someone who didn’t love her. I’ve lived in Southern California for nine years, almost half of my life, and yet, I don’t feel like a Southern Californian, and definitely didn’t feel like I was from Oceanside. I didn’t embody it. I was not a skinny blond, I didn’t like surfing, and I didn’t go out with boys who talked fast or drove cars, or had wads of pale green cash in their baggy jeans. Sometimes I went to dances hosted by the youth center, and with their hard wood floors and flashing lights and loud music that thumped against the walls, seduced me into thinking that if I danced enough hours, and went to enough diners afterwards, or hung around the dimly lit streets of Tremont, I could become the Oceanside that a teenager should before, but I could not.

I’m a few steps away from that youth center but I’m so far away from that memory. That girl would’ve never worn skirts or earrings. Me and Carisha’s conversation dies down to a series of snatches, a few snippets of random words, and looking at people. “I wish I could live out here forever,” she sighs as she wiggles her toes through the sand. She says there’s so much to do. You were blocks away from the beach, you could’ve come here everyday, she says. It’s nice here. There are different kinds of people, she says. There’s different ethnicities, different cultures, and you didn’t like it here? And I look around and bunch my skirt up closer to my thighs because the water’s getting higher, and my skirt is getting wet from the water and sand swishing toward me. A lot of people wander around on this beach too, probably to catch the sun as I have: a woman drenched in a long sleeved t-shirt and panties skitters across the beach, an old couple with rolls of skin sagged from age waddles with baby steps to the water. A trio of buzzed cut, slightly muscular marines stroll the beach, possibly to look for their next one night stands. A pale girl lolls in the water, jumps with the waves, with a bikini in a color so bright I can’t tell if it’s green or yellow. The sunlight bends around her skin, her almost transparent skin and dark brown hair make her look like a floating highlighter in the sea. There’s a woman with the body of a sixteen year old cross country runner, athletic and sinewy, but her wriggled face, purple lips and yellow teeth tell that she’s a middle aged smoker. A sign sits on the sand that warns of a rip current, another sign the arrows in opposite directions separate the swimmers from the surfers. Maybe this is what Carisha sees, and for a moment, I wish I could’ve seen this too, in all my days when I tried to be an Oceanside native, and I couldn’t be.

But this’ll be my last day in Oceanside, or in Southern California, ever, or at least for a while, which will feel like ever. In twelve hours I’ll be on a plane to Utah, then to Oakland, to go on with the next chapter of my life, where there may be no beaches, or pale girls that resemble highlighters, or marines stalking the turf. I’m not sure if I’ll miss all this. Maybe, maybe not. Our conversation grows distant, changes a few times, and she talks about moving maybe to Austin or Portland, because all the people she loves are moving away from Los Angeles, the city that was the stage for her college life, and maybe she should too. “You’ll be okay,” she says. She tells me that she’s going to move soon, even though she loves San Diego, the lazy pace of the area, where it almost feels okay to move slowly, to just wait because the wind stops, the sunsets are the same and there’s always a beach to go to. Because with the weather and the sand, and the sun and everything else being so good, you had the time to wait for anything, because everything is so perfect. She wants a change, she says. She stops, looks out at the sea, water clinging to her black leggings and her sandy toes in still in her black flip flops. “I think I’m just waiting for ‘it’ to happen,” she says. I don’t, and do know what it, is. It could be doing something else with our life besides what Oceanside has to offer, besides the perfection of the city. It is the thing I’m trying to grasp after leaving Oceanside five years ago, and leaving Riverside, for a place I knew little about. To be the grown adult, who could own the adjective, mature, or responsible, or independent, things I couldn’t say I am at this moment. But even when I’m watching girls scoop almost muddy sand in piles for a sand castle, I don’t think Oceanside could offer me that. So I just say, “Word, I feel you on that,” when Carisha asks me what I think.

Welcome to Oakland

Part of my new job as Volunteer Coordinator is that I have to tutor the kids directly to get a feel for their own needs. While I was tutoring a third grade class today, a car alarm went off, and there was some glass shattering in the background. And then some footsteps. I thought one of the kids would’ve cried, or shouted, or at the very least jumped, and no one did. They were all used to it.

Welcome to Oakland, the teacher said.

This is a relocation, not a move

I’ve traded the too hot days smoggy days of Riverside for the cool fog of Berkeley, and sometimes sunny Oakland. I’m in the bay area now (yay) after training for four days in Provo Utah, which happens to be the dive bar capital of the world and some breath taking (literally) hikes. I’ll post the pictures here when I can get my computer to work with internet, but it’ll be a while.

In the meantime, I’m staying with my project manager Carol in her beautiful house in Berkeley. I’ve got the job, but no place to stay, and since the pay period this month is a little weird, I might be here a little longer than I hoped. Her house is absolutely lovely — it’s picturesque and quaint and old, which might explain why there are so few electrical outlets, but I don’t want to touch anything. I’m feeling worried and confused, like if only I had planned out my money better, or gotten an extra job I would’ve had enough money saved to get my own place, but I don’t.

Noel requested that I write about the actual move, and I know I suck. I can’t, because I haven’t actually moved into my own place. I’ll just have to be a nomad and stay with people for a some time until I can scrounge up enough change to move. Maybe I’m just feeling confused, and a little nostalgic, because I sleep with my UCR commencement bear every night, and the collector stuffed thingie my best friend gave me, and think of all the good times I had. Of happy hour with my old Americorps crew, or knowing where the grocery store was and planning my next submission for workshop, or waxing philosophical at just about any place I could. And all that’s gone, along with my bike, my cooking utensils and my big comfy bed, because I gave all that stuff away.

What was I thinking? I knew where everything in Riverside was, and how to navigate the city, and for some reason I was feeling something foolish for being here, where it’s 61 degrees and people turn on the AC because it’s warm. That’s not warm. 102, that’s warm. That’s when you should turn on the AC. Riverside left a baking in the bones, and warm, balmy nights that invited people to chill in the boba shop, or Starbucks or the Getaway Cafe, and here all I want to do is run in Carol’s house (NOT my house) to get out of the cold.

The thing though was that my five years in college was this game of hurry up and wait. Those last two years were spent waiting for the next stage of my life so that my time could be my time, and now it’s here. It’s happening. I’m not anticipating being up here anymore, I’m here. And now I feel like I’m not ready for it. Sure, I could go to Cal and some of the bars, or call one of my friends up here and go out with them, but I wouldn’t mind staying in this house for days, but I’ve got to leave and try to establish a life, or at the very least, go to work.

Wow. I thought I was going to be all excited, but like I said in a previous post, this isn’t summer camp anymore, and it’s starting to lose that kind of luster. And as much as I want to replace it, I can’t, because this is different. So, Noel, sorry man. This wasn’t a move. This was a relocation. Moving implies that you’re just going to take one item and put it in another place. I mean, sure, if I’m the item, then that’s moving, but there’s so much I have to replace, because it’s starting a life, not a new lease, not moving in with parents, but in a new place. And that replacement of place is scary. I’m a different place now, and being here, like finally getting here, and realizing how much I had in Riverside that I won’t have anymore, has made me feel the uncertainty I had about the whole thing.

I never thought I’d miss Riverside, or college. But I do.

Sera Anunciado

I’m without internet for a while, since I am in between jobs, locations, and all that stuff, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve been lazy with my writing. I’ll probably post everything when I can get online with my own computer, which may be for a few more days. In the meantime, here’s a funny story. I was jogging this morning (because I’m trying to lose weight/feel better about myself/stop being lazy) and I ran across this dog. It looked like a mutt, so I figured that if I walk slowly by the dog, it won’t bark. It did, and it was loud, and chased me down the street. The dog’s owner came out, a thirtysomething lady laughing, giggling, “Be careful. He bites!” I shouted out, “Come get your dog, lady!” but she didn’t get him. I almost wished that dog would bite me, just so I could sue this chick. Do dog owners think they have some entitlement to not keeping their animals on leashes? I mean, I was on the street. It wasn’t like I was on her property or anything. I’m sure it was just her, and not all dog owners, but I’m beginning to think twice about I jog. For those who do read this blog, any suggestions for a next post?