Santa Cruz, California

Up since 3:30.  The worst insomnia I have ever experienced, and I have to say I've been experiencing a lot recently.  Dog tired, and unable to sleep.  Tried the breathing, tried the reading, tried it all (except taking something for it, the appropriate medicines having been left in the truck.)  Read until I could not keep my eyes open, then shut my eyes with blissful relief, then... nothing.  No blissful cessation.  No sleep.

Santa Cruz is a charged location for me.  I came here as a freshman forty years ago, and experienced one year of wild frenetic youth before the funding for college was removed from me and I was forced, with a broken heart that has never fully healed, to drop out.  After a few months of despair, I decided to be fully independent and spent a peripatetic few years working and paying my way through two other colleges. Eventually I returned to Santa Cruz -- older, wiser, meaner, and far more skilled in the ways of the world -- to complete my degree from the place I had started from and always loved.  I finished on my own terms, with a gritty determination to be my own person, fiercely independent, and to never allow anyone to take something utterly precious away from me ever again.

Santa Cruz is fraught with my most extreme memories.  From the only year of my life where I did not had to work a job (or take care of a parent), to the years of working four jobs, finishing up my degree, and creating a working relationship with the world that has lasted me the rest of my life -- I have been both my most free and my most indentured here.  Here I created my working and living persona, a persona largely composed of pushing through, embracing fully, doggedly serving my responsibilities, and finding joy in a vast spectrum of people, professions, ideas, and experiences.

I grew up here.  It was here that I was, for the only brief period of my life, able to be my young self in real time, a freshman taking classes and making friends and being confused and scared and ecstatic at the prospect of life unfolding before her. It was here I learned how to push the limits of my endurance and resourcefulness.  And now, hours before my next set of medical obstacles, I come back to this place and find the old intensity vibrating around me, the siren song of youth mixed with its pain and loneliness and fear. 

None of which make for a good night's sleep.

After almost three hours of trying, I finally get up.  We are in a beautifully restored Victorian mansion overlooking the Boardwalk. The appointments are lovely, their grace and quality bitterly underscoring the weird conflicted alienation I am feeling.  I want to be here.  I want to relax.  I want to sit in this sweet room with the rain beating down around us, watching a movie, being cozy, having a moment to breathe and be at peace.  I want to explore this big old house, find a way up to the widow's walk on top, check out the view from the balconies.  Instead I am simply gripped with apprehension.  Me, the conquering warrior who came back to this town to complete what she had finished.  Me, the determined scrappy street kid who juggled it all, and surmounted enough obstacles to learn how to manage life in the process.  Me the sturdy, me the strong.  Gripped with apprehension.

Mostly, I need fresh air.  So I pull on a sweatshirt and jeans and edge out of the room, finding my way to the front porch of the house.  I am immediately hit by the smell of the air.  Cold and bracing,  smelling of the sea, and clarity, and hope.  It was in this air that I would wake up early as a young female stagehand and bike up to the civic center, to work the Miss Cal pageant, slogging through 16 hours hauling cable with the guys. In this air I would get up and trudge to class, the redwoods up on the hill adding their ecstatic flavors to the tang of the sea air.  The same chill.  The same piercing sadness interlaced with crazy joy.  The beauty of the freshness too much to be apprehended.  The despair a deep component of it, part of it, inextricable.

How can I say I was, and am, so happy in this place when it's all so permeated with such sadness?  The happiness I feel here is maybe even because of that, because of the intensity, because of all the layers and flavors.

This is a place where I feel.  Maybe that's because this is a place where I was authentically young once, full of the erratic emotions of true youth. This is a place where I've been ragged and harsh and extreme.  This time around I have come back for solace and escape and a whiff of that freedom... but in the nighttime hours I now remember that none of those things have ever been peaceful, or easy, or free.  Always, as now, they are pierced through with pain and regret, even as my heart flies with elation and joy.

During those years, I battled through obstacles and ended up the conqueror.  Perhaps I can do that once again.  The sunrise greets me as I sit on the wide porch of this house, the rays unexpected, a message from the world that the cycles are constant, even when forgotten.  And even as I feel the warmth of the light of the new day on my face, there is some part of my soul still in darkness. A widow staring out to sea, grieving her lost youth.  Still searching, ever watchful.