Page 32 of Happy After All

So many people are still living in motor homes, and cooking is difficult. We have a general fund people contribute to as and when they can, and the courtyard is large enough to host extra people. Plus, the kids get to stay and watch movies on the big screen.

It gives them a distraction from the confined spaces they’re living in.

I have decided I will be bringing out my pink floating lounger for the occasion.

The thing about having a December birthday and a mother who resents your existence is that the event tends to be minimized. Birthdays are very important to me.

When I lived in LA, I loved nothing more than celebrating my friends extravagantly and being celebrated extravagantly in return.

Chris was even good at that for a while. That’s the problem with Christopher—I’m determined to try to think of him that way. Christopher Weaver, the public entity. Not Chris, my ex.

I have good memories of us being together. I have good memories of our little apartment, then of our home once we both achieved a little more success.

He felt like he might be my first real experience of a family.

Not like my parents.

We talked about marriage. We talked about a future.

If it hadn’t been good for even most of the time, I wouldn’t have been with him. Today is one of the few days I genuinely miss parts of my old life.

For the most part, I have drawn a pink curtain around myself. Around this place.

It isn’t that I got a new identity and didn’t tell anyone. My closest friends do know where I am.

Well. They were my closest friends.

They text less and less frequently. I’m pretty sure that’s my fault.

We had this big shared friend group, and a breakup made that almost impossible. I could have won the breakup too. I think I did, actually.

He cheated. That was pretty straightforward; he didn’t deny it. Everybody was mad at him, not me.

But I was the one who couldn’t handle it. I was the one who couldn’t spend one more minute in that whitewashed hell.

I was the one who had to run away to bright colors and romance novels and the unrelenting heat.

The problem with healing through metamorphosis is that bringing too much baggage with you makes it feel too difficult.

Maybe it’s not healing.

Maybe it’s just surviving.

The idea of radical acceptance and opening myself up to the universe helped me feel like I was thriving. One of the wonderful things about the desert is the preponderance of crystal shops and tarot readers. A feeling that you might be closer to something unknowable or supernatural. It’s hard to access that when you’re stuck in gridlock traffic.

But here, I feel it.

Vibrations from the earth, voices on the wind. Like I was fated to be here, as much as I don’t want to believe the pain that brought me here was fate. I feel it.

Or maybe I justwantto.

Like I want to celebrate my birthday floating in a pool watching Buddy the elf find his family. It’s a distraction. From the loneliness that tried to crowd in.

From the anxiety I feel over the unresolved issue of Chris coming to Rancho Encanto.

I’m sure he has no idea I’m here. Our old friends who do know would have had to tell him, and I just don’t think they would.

It’s not like I changed my identity and started again, but I don’t like to give my exact location to very many people. Least of all Chris.

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