Dreams of Santa Fe

Many summers ago, I drove cross country through the hot south with a guy I was not quite having an affair with. We visited a mission in Kentucky and swam naked at dawn in a cold lake in Tennessee and went to Graceland and sped all the way across Arkansas in the middle of the night and sometimes discussed the affair we weren't having and sometimes came close to having it and listened to wafty jazz across Texas. When we got to Santa Fe, we had lunch at the Coyote Cafe and walked around the Plaza and went to a beautiful church and talked about just staying there. We both had summer paychecks, and we thought we could rent an apartment and find jobs and see what happened. But we had a wedding to go to that weekend in L.A., so we didn't.

We had a great breakfast in Flagstaff and hiked in the pine forests near Prescott. In L.A. we stayed in Koreatown and went to the wedding of my ex-boyfriend who was also his ex-roommate. Then we drove up to Santa Barbara and stayed in a commune with some hippies out in Isla Vista. We camped by the side of a dead-end road in Big Sur and I lay awake all night, sure that the rustling in the bushes was ax murderers about to get us. We spent a few weeks in San Francisco, and went to a party in the Mission at the house of another college friend who had a homemade hot tub in his backyard made from an old bathtub. That friend joined us for a backpacking trip in Desolation where the full moon reflected off the granite and it never got dark.

Then I went back east and he went on to Oregon to meet another girl. Years later, he came to dinner when S and I lived in Berkeley. He brought beer and hot sauce with crazy names, and they played guitar and we laughed all night.

I wonder what would have happened if we'd stayed in Santa Fe.

It's ok that we didn't.

Tonight I talked to my friend J who just moved from Red State Capital City to Santa Fe. We talked about what it's like to finally live where you feel you're meant to be and how hard it is to move.

I miss her.