A shoebox in Santa Monica - #218
Fuck, marry, hate forever.
Welcome to Growing Conditions, a summer series of letters to the places I used to live. Each week, I’m writing a letter—sent in the mail and posted here—to an address that grew me. We’re losing the thread in la-la-land.
My smallest apartment clocked in at 200 sq ft. It was an in-law suite on the back of a house near Ocean Ave in Santa Monica. My front door opened onto the back deck. Here is where I would have the worst boyfriend of my life, then the most famous, and then the one I would marry. It’s where I would rethink my whole career, meet my next cat, and close the doors on Date By Numbers to turn all my recreational energy into cycling and all my professional energy into Being Someone.
I moved into this room in October of 2013, and I moved out in October 2015. And in it, I didn’t move much. There wasn’t room. When you opened the door, you were four feet from the bed. To the left, I kept a small wooden table with a center, swivel base. Around it were two Ikea benches with storage underneath—one against the wall, one butting up to the bed like a sideboard.
The bed sat on the same metal frame I’d had since New York. Instead of a headboard, I hung 8x11” photos printed from work on regular printing paper from 5’ bamboo sticks painted red. Then, it was a way I could look at my life and confirm I was still living it. Across from the bed were two linen closets filled to the gills with suitcases and bike paraphernalia and too many shoes. There was a hair’s length of space remaining when I hung my two bikes, on above the other, on the wall between these closets. If I’d been any taller, my bikes any longer, it wouldn’t have worked.
Just past the bed was a high-top, narrow table against the wall with a stool underneath it, and my painting supplies on it. I kept painting girls kissing and cats lounging and waves lapping, and you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to read the tea leaves of my life.
Flanking the narrow table were two doors, one to the bathroom and one to the kitchen. The bathroom was the standard shower, toilet, sink, and the kitchen was smaller than that, with enough room to spin, but not enough to pirouette—there wouldn’t be room to get your knee up.
And so, I often left the door to the deck to the house open. It helped to air out the grief.
I never wanted to live in LA. I grew up hating it like a sports team simply because my dad did. I was meant to be a New Yorker, though at this point, I learned that wasn’t true. So why not. Why not find myself rejected and heartbroken and forlorn in a city I would hate.
The routine from Boulder was ingrained now. I woke up, put on my kit, and rode to work. I showered there, ate breakfast there, and did my best not to live there. I asked for raises constantly. And I lived a life by bike. In that first year, I never saw the east side. I set my Tinder perimeter to 1 mile. One mile was all I was willing to consider, because I wanted to be able to walk. I didn’t have a car in LA. I didn’t need one.
I didn’t need one, I just carried the 25lb tub of cat litter home on my shoulder.
I didn’t need one, I just walked the three miles from work home alone in the dark.
I didn’t need one, my room was small and my life was small and without noticing, I had become small there too.
It’s wild how one person, one singular person out of billions and billions of people, can cast a spell so wicked and so dark as to make a flower turn in on itself when the sun, the big beautiful sun, is right fucking there.
If you’re in the bed, looking at the bikes on the wall between the two closets, which is where I was, then you can see the flight path he took. We were on quilt, and he rolled off toward the bathroom, got up, walked around the bed, and out the door and didn’t come back that night.
It was the night I found out my brother was sick, that something was so wrong as to fundamentally change him, and I was scared it would come for me too.
“That’s what happened to my ex-girlfriend,” he said, over my tears. “And that’s worse.”
“What?”
It was worse when it happened to him, he kept saying, he kept diminishing, he kept pushing. What, I kept saying, before he told me he needed to leave to smoke a joint, leaving me and the future alone on the mattress on metal stilts.
There is a vine of golden thread called dodder. It wraps around a host plant, sends feeding structures into the stem, and drains nutrients directly from the host’s vascular system. The dodder finds its host by scent. It grows toward the healthiest plant nearby, it chooses the strongest one because that’s the best meal. The host keeps photosynthesizing, keeps producing, and the dodder takes it all.
I’m standing by the door, the blinds halfway shut, looking out onto the sunshine dabbled deck, the bamboo growing enormously tall around the garden’s perimeter.
“So I don’t have anything?”
“No. You’re all good,” the doctor said over the phone, the light rippling down onto my feet.
Another disease had woven into our relationship, pernicious and accusatory. “You gave this to me,” he said. And I went to the doctor to see if I had.
“If I were not at the clinic, and I was consulting with a friend, I would tell them their boyfriend cheated on them.”
The way you kill dodder is you cut it at the base before it seeds. If you wait too long, it drops seeds into the soil and comes back. The gardener has to be decisive. One cut.
The emails started then. You’re a slut. You’re a fucking slut. And I wish so badly I had been. I wish I had done every single thing he’d accused me of because I faced the consequences anyway, cropping me out of photos while damning me not being more dedicated to him.
I didn’t wait a day to get back on Tinder. I didn’t wait a single day to try to rekindle the person I knew I had once been.
Indoorsy, it said, and I laughed.
A week later, I was on a date with a celebrity. A week after that, we were dating.
And a week after that, I saw a boy across the street leaning on his bike in his race kit, one hand on the handlebars, the other on the seat.
For three months I went on dates to vegan restaurants and comedy clubs. And I liked it. I liked him. I liked so much about him.
“The thing most people don’t understand about marriage,” he was saying, “is that only 50% of it the person’s personality. The other 50% is what time they get up in the morning, what they eat for breakfast, how they spend their weekends.”
For three months, I dated a man who wouldn’t stay in my apartment. I dated 11am, vegan smoothies, comedy clubs, and I looked at my dry soil, my paltry growth, and wondered about my 50%.
“Why would we stay here, when we could stay at my place?”
And I didn’t know how to argue with his space, his reality.
Three months later, the boy on the bike in his kit would end up next to me on the bike path.
“Am I being ghosted?” Came the text from a cool house in a big life.
“I’m sorry, I think I met the love of my life.”
“Well, can’t argue with that.”
Six months later, I left Santa Monica. Six months later, I left smallness behind for a person and a place where I could be the one who grows, who vines, who calls from her cool house in her big life.
Six months later, I moved to the Spiderbox.
This series is SO good. Thank you for opening up and sharing your places with us.
I learned about dodder on a hike this morning but you provided better details. I have had dodder people in my life in the past and that decisive cut can be so hard and then the best thing you ever did.
If I’m not mistaken, the spider box is how I was initially introduced to your existence! Though you would not yet know of my existence. (Cue twin peaks theme song.) I really do appreciate your vulnerability with this series. It’s a unique and beautiful way to get to know someone better.