Santa Barbara

One Love

Alongside sail boats, flowering trees, and a backdrop of undulating mountains, I feel at home on the Santa Barbara Bay.

The beach is shared by handsome volleyball players, nerdy college techies, hippies, and yacht sailors. The atmosphere is decidedly more laid back than the so cal beaches.

I walk the pier with a mint chocolate chip ice cream exploring local pottery, street performances, and observing budding romance.

As the afternoon progresses, love is in the air.

A couple asks me to take their picture giddily expressing that it's their 40th wedding anniversary. That's old love.

Two moms dressed to the nines look on joyously as their two daughters get married in a private beach ceremony. Not that homosexual love is any different than heterosexual love but to love so strongly that you want to express your commitment in a country where a large segment of the population does not value your right to do so; that's brave love.


As I walk further down the pier, I see an Asian family and a Jewish family embracing sharing toasts. Two dissimilar cultures bound together by love, by marriage. To embrace the unfamiliar as your own, that's family love.


I take a seat in the sand and overhear two college girls contemplating why he didn't call, why was he flirting with that other girl. I know that conversation well, the "he's just not that into you" conversation.  In my own life, I call it the mr.greene phenomena. There will always be a handsome guy with an easy confidence that will at some point cause a girl to undervalue her own awesomeness and torment herself with question of why he doesn't want to be with me. She'll justify away his behavior as bad timing or he's shy or he would like me more if I would just...


The reality is that guy probably just doesn't like you that much. Not because your ugly or boring but just because "he's not that into you." It's a simple lesson, one I felt like expressing to those girls, but realized at 27, I haven't quite learned that lesson completely. Some things in life have to be experienced and not taught.  I laughed a little as I thought about how I had justified away why the shy guy in my life hadn't asked me out.  He could be the exception and it could be bad timing, but more than likely he's just not that into me.  Allowing yourself to be enough without someone else's affirmation, well that's self love (Self love takes a little time to work out the kinks).


As late afternoon set in, I became melancholy. I want that type of love: lasting, brave, all encompassing. I thought about my failed relationships, the most recent one in which I chased away a boyfriend because I couldn’t make a commitment. I thought about how much time I had wasted in life waiting for the right guy to ask me out instead of enjoying the nice, handsome, available guys of my present.  I began to get tears of self pity, tears of loneliness.

Then, a circle of drum playing hippies began to chant “One Love”.  I looked at my holey t-shirt, the dirt ring around my ankles, and the week old entrance bracelet on my wrist, and I thought if ever a time those hippies would be my kind of love, well tonight was it.  I quit my job, I’m living out of my car, I have a blank future, and a roadmap to nowhere in particular, might as well enjoy the present.  I sat on the fringe of their circle, and I listened to them bang their drums; I let those small tears run down my smiling face. 
I can’t wallow in the pity of the past or the uncertainty of the future, the only option for happiness is to live each moment in the present.  This is a great moment.  I know the joy of the open road, the possibility of each new day, and the freedom to do whatever I please.
 I imagine a decade from tonight, somewhere with a baby on my hip, maybe in a PTA meeting, I will look fondly on the memory of tonight, of these hippies, and their drums, and my freedom.