Waking Up With a Headache

And Missing Home

I awake this morning with a headache and suddenly find my life incomprehensible. How I ended up in this dry, dusty red place no humidifier can penetrate is a mystery I cannot seem to crack no matter how hard I wrack my hurting brain.

Maybe I’m mistaken, but the only question I have this morning is how do I get back to the lush air, the sweetness, the gardenias of L.A.? To the fading purple jacaranda? How do I get back to the place where I felt so vibrantly, vibratingly myself?

I drag the dining room table back into the living room where it belongs, where I can write properly. Writing may put things back into place. Or it may become a red dust devil that twirls me away and plunks me back down, killing a witch but proffering a small window within which I may make off with the ruby slippers, click my heels twice and finally discover myself brushing off this dry red dust, home. I’d say this morning there’s roughly an equal chance of either.

Before the world went crazy, I was happy. I was home.

And then I let it all get to me.

I think if I have one core problem, it’s that: I let things get to me. I’ll be perfectly happy sitting on the couch reading and then glance at my phone and let something get to me. Or out of the corner of my eye I’ll catch sight of someone lurking along the nice, smooth concrete floors of Natural Grocers wearing a damned surgical mask and suddenly I’m swearing under my breath.

Maybe I’m just letting the desert get to me today, but I’m not getting any younger, that’s for sure. And I think this dry air is doing me no favors.

People tell you to bloom where you’re planted and that it doesn’t matter where you are. Which I know is absolute bullshit because during monsoon season* when I painted the shed in my backyard I was happy in there. Like, really happy.

But now it’s either too cold or too hot or too early or too late and it’s always too dry and I’m too busy and I get lost and can’t seem to find my way back to my shed. I also can’t seem to shed the ominous feeling that someone’s taking roll and I’m absent from where I’m supposed to be. Once, I had a chance to live in the cool shade of the canyon, in a cabin next to the creek, which might have saved me—but I blew that, so at some point, I think I just have to give up trying to stay in the desert and finally go back home.

You may think I’m deluded but places make me feel happy.

Some of the spreading disaster of this morning is due to the fact that I’ve spent it, uncomfortable and cold, reading my way back to L.A.—and away from here. Most of the time here I can gaze out at the mountains and be something like okay, even overwhelmingly grateful and in awe, but I mostly don’t go outside because it’s too dry and too cold or too hot and everything is desiccated and I don’t want to desiccate; I don’t want to watch idly as my life desiccates. I’m not doing well as a bird of paradise trying to become a cactus, or at least a succulent (which, btw, is so mis-named).

I know you’re supposed to fall in love with people and not places, but I fell in love with L.A. and the moment I step out of Burbank airport I start to cry I’m so happy to be back there.

And why shouldn’t you be where you love??**

But this morning, not stepping out of the Burbank airport, I’m uncomfortable and restless and going rancid. This morning I crave only the sheeny L.A. sunshine on sparkling concrete sidewalks that I can never adequately describe. I crave breathing the open, alive air of L.A. that has always smelled, to me, exactly like Love.

*I do love monsoon season. In fact, the delightful discovery of the all-too fickle promise of a monsoon season may be the faint but still audible siren song that holds me here. That and avoiding, at least for a time, once again relocating my even more delightful daughter.

**I guess the obvious answer to this question is the very reason I left: when where you love turns its back on you, won’t let you enter a restaurant unless you poison yourself and tells your little daughter she can’t go to school unless you do the unthinkable and poison her as well. Dark times, but maybe, just maybe I can somehow skirt all of that now. Maybe it wasn’t L.A. that turned its back—maybe it was just some people I didn’t know, who didn’t matter. Maybe I can somehow, finally learning I had what it took all along (courage, heart and brains), get back home.

image credit Vincent Gerbouin