The heat takes its toll

I am lonely.

As with everything in my life, it's taken me a few months, nearly a year to realize how much I miss my daughter who is in Maine, and my son who is in Brooklyn. I have many great girlfriends and a family who couldn't be more supportive, but up here in the canyon, on these sweltering hot days, even punctuated with lunches and meetings and emails and busy work, I am lonely.

I've been told that my private life is shared too generously here and I'm feeling self-conscious about writing about it. But when I don't write, it hurts. When I do write, it's cathartic. I hope, dear reader, you will cut me some slack.

This week has been horrible. I am not patient, nor am I trusting, and I've spent the week thus far struggling to get along. In yoga this morning, usually the thing that saves me -- I just need to show up -- I had to concentrate very hard in order to get into it and not think about what is on my mind. I found myself fighting back tears in the cat/cow (not ideal, let me tell you).

I arrived at a lunch with a dear friend half an hour late because I was distracted. I was almost in tears when I got there. And somehow, miraculously, he cheered me up, firmed my resolve, made me realize that I had a lot of my life ahead of me and I could make decisions that weren't just based in LA and my life now.  He said, this dear, bearded man, who is struggling with his own much much bigger problems, "follow your heart." He is open and kind and authentic and unguarded. It's hard to express how his openness and loving personality affects one. It emboldened me. It made me realize there were possibilities.

This heat is endless. You can't escape it. The ground is dry and brown and brittle and the birds sing in a lack-lustre monotone. The dogs want to go out but don't have the same energy. I take them early, in the morning, around seven or earlier, and there is still a promise of green, some moisture left over from the night, but very little. But somehow the mornings are regenerative, fresh still, the air is new.

I have made a mistake that may be the biggest fuck-up I've ever made. And I've made it because I'm an idiot, because I'm scared, because I'm anxious. I went from being the happiest I've ever been to the most miserable and there seems to be little recourse.

I am lonely. I'm not used to this solitude. I want a house full of people. I want England and green and fields and bluebells and forests and cows and Sunday lunch. And my mother, my brother, my sister, my best friend, my boy (if he will have me). I want my dogs to run in woods. I want to have rain and frizzy hair and curlywurlys and mouldy old churches, and a place where God exists without apology. I want where my bones feel part of the architecture. I don't want to live in this hot, dry city, wearing this corset of propriety.  I don't want to fake it till I make it. I want to go where the grass is green by default and you can walk in the dew in the morning at four or five and the sun is up. I'm begging for a simple life, a life where I can follow my heart.

I want to stop saying "I". I want to say "we" or "you." I crave rebirth, being bathed in cool saltwater. I miss the Oslo fjord, the sound of the seabirds over the house and on the roof, picnics at sea, walking in wildflowers. I want to look after someone again, make suppers every night, stoke fires, doing the washing up in suddy bubbles while singing loudly and hold hands while walking through trees, unadorned. I want to eat smoked fish and horseradish and smell the chalk of the Chiltern Hills where the badgers have dug it up. I want city foxes and country foxes and no more howling, sad, thin coyotes.

I swear to God, that if I wasn't a feminist and if I didn't know better, I'd say I needed saving.


I do so apologize for being such a melodramatic downer. I know tomorrow will be better.