We Were Just Two Girls in California

A story of growing up & getting out

The year started with an unexpected loss, which reminded me of where I came from and put me inside a funeral hall with young adults I hadn’t seen since we were teenagers. The following morning, I was to board a flight with a suitcase twice the size of me. A rebellious attempt to uproot my life and move to San Diego. Rebellious as it may have seemed, I had been contemplating the decision for months. Ok, fine. Years.

The death of a girl my age — a girl that I, unfortunately, felt phony still calling a friend, but with whom I shared many engrained coming-of-age moments like awkward firsts, secret late-night calls, journals of passed notes, and inappropriate doodles — made me even more hesitant to leave the town I never strayed far from.

I realized life is a fragile domino effect, and every decision we make holds the potential to dictate every other decision we’ll ever make.

I just didn’t want to regret leaving. What if something happens while I’m gone? What if I don’t find whatever it is I’m looking for? What if I can’t afford it and have to beg on the street for money? I could never admit that I burned through my entire life savings on a 300 square foot studio apartment just so I could live a stone’s throw away from dog beach.

I nearly canceled my flight but instead, I verbally slapped some sense into myself, checked in, and got my ass out of bed. When I landed in California, I felt relief. The only thing I regretted was how enormous my suitcase was. Struggling to hoist my own baggage into the trunk of my Uber, I hitched a ride over to my cousin’s apartment in Pacific Beach.

Haley is the most carefree contagion of good vibes, zero fucks, and virile femininity that I have the privilege of knowing, or better yet, being related to.

The two of us have gotten ourselves into some pretty sticky, pretty hilarious situations — like that one time we were pulled over at two in the morning driving a white convertible that didn’t belong to either of us. We were let off with my sloppy recital of the alphabet and her foggy memory of the incident the following morning. I can still see her now, sitting there in the passenger seat with her mini skirt preferring its new life as a tube top, her black thong making its second appearance of the night. When the cop asked for registration, she handed him a lime green pamphlet she found amongst a stack of papers in the dashboard. It was the program from Shrek the Musical. “That’s not it, is it?” she wrinkled her nose.

Which almost beats the time we drove to Las Vegas on a whim, got plastered at the hotel pool well before sunset, criticized Coyote Ugly for being nothing like the movie, and then slept the night away in our ashtray of a hotel room.

Or the first time we ever stepped foot in San Diego. We commemorated the moment by thrashing around the Pacific waves on a couple of boogie boards we found. Our waterproof camera, and all the memories of that trip, never to be seen again.

Or in Joshua Tree National Park when Haley and her backpack were literally caught between a rock and a hard place because we thought it’d be fun to hike off the beaten path. I’ll never forget the way her body contorted as she tried to squeeze between two Giant Rocks through a Haley-shaped sliver, Haley-shaped if only she had turned her body sideways. Instead, she went straight through and her shoulders nearly snapped out of their sockets as tears of laughter flirted with the sweat on our faces.

Or all those times we got away with free lobsters, free coffees, free band merch because shit, I guess we’re pretty charming. And each time, we can’t help but thank Grandpa Ray up in heaven, or wherever the hell he is, shaking his head while reluctantly bailing us out again.

So, it was only appropriate that my social butterfly of a cousin wasn’t home when I arrived. She had left the spare key in the mailbox which, conveniently enough, was too high for me to reach. I considered asking a neighbor for help or waiting for her to come home, knowing full-well that it wouldn’t matter how many hours I waited, I’d forget why I was pissed as soon as I heard her truck whip into the driveway and her voice bellow out the window…

“LIV-AAAY!” Gets me every time.

But then I realized I had in my possession the perfect boost: My beast of a mothafuckin’ suitcase. With it flipped on its side, I could step up just high enough to reach the bottom of the mailbox where the key lay, mocking me.

Welcome to California.

The following month was nonsense. We shared a bed where we farted and giggled, and then farted from giggling like we were kids again.

We watched the Patriots cream the Rams in Super Bowl LIII in a bar with quite possibly the only other Pats fans in town. We were running from that bar to the next when I tripped over the sidewalk and skinned my face on the pavement, like a little boy riding his bike for the first time without training wheels. Haley is naturally more athletic and coordinated than me, except she fell too. Her knees gave out when she saw the bloody burn on my chin.

I cooked for her and took pride in being her housewife since her boyfriend was out of town on business. We complained to him on the phone each time his work trip was extended, and then fist-pumped and high-fived like the immature little shits that we are. I smoked a bong for the first time since college and nearly hacked up my left lung. We binged all five seasons of Broad City because what else is there to do? I started writing a new novel I still haven’t finished. We hiked some trails, and I mooched off every single “Free First Week” yoga promotion within walking distance from the apartment.

I also started taking care of the most well-behaved sweetheart of an Australian Cattle dog named Luna, who had hiked parts of the Appalachian, Long, and Continental Divide trails alongside her outdoorsy owners. I hadn’t put this together but Luna may have been the reason I hesitated settling down in San Diego.

There was no way I could ever die happily knowing a dog had traveled more than me.

It was either Luna or the fleeting reality Haley and I fabricated for ourselves. Either way, I found myself looking at some pretty baller apartments a few blocks from the beach and making up excuses for why they didn’t fit. I found myself sending half-assed applications to jobs I didn’t want. Something inside me just wasn’t ready to stop moving.

And that’s when I got the call from down under.

This call would mark the first time I said yes to spontaneous vulnerability. It changed the trajectory of the next two years of my life and began the narrative that inspired this publication, a virtual hostel for sharing travel stories and meeting beautiful people from all over the world.

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