LA -- So Far Away

It's now nearly a month since we departed LA for good, just three days shy of that one month mark. The time has passed swiftly, despite spending our days idling away on the beach. The water is now warmer. The days longer as the sun sets well past 8:00 PM. I've spoken to two friends from LA since leaving. All of the emotions associated with life in LA is packed away, almost neatly. I haven't yet reached the state of nostalgia or sentimentality, but each day brings new emotional distance, a distance I had craved and now have. The pull of glancing backwards is almost gone. I know our New York apartment is getting organized as my husband opens and unpacks boxes after work. He now views his life entirely as a New Yorker, LA now just a part of his past. I, for obvious reasons, can't say the tether to my previous life is that easily severed. I am still between places, between lives.

I am cherishing my time here on the Vineyard. It is the perfect antidote for the frenzy and emotional turbulence of the past few months. This island, our family oasis, is what any doctor would have prescribed. But it is still strange to be so in between lives. It is as if my life is a perfect triangle, LA, the Vineyard, and New York. And I've only made it from one point to the second with a wait before completing the triangle. Yet each year on this island brings another level of ties to this place as more faces from the beach now bear names, sometimes even phone numbers getting exchanged, promises for drinks made. One of those familiar faces now with a name searched for my son on the beach. She found me and asked us to come sing 'happy birthday' for her daughter's 6th birthday. Each of us was given a perfectly made cupcake with pink frosting and a maraschino cherry on top. It is these moments of connection that weds our family to this island, our family now becoming part of this legacy of those who summer here.

All of our mail, forwarded from LA to New York, now arrives bearing yellow stickers with our new address. I've received a stack of New Yorkers waiting to be read. Each of this is a daily reminder that our lives are unfolding in this new place, in this new era, so to speak.