Crystal Torres

Happily Ever After

Life isn’t a love-in – it’s the dishes, and the orthodontist, and the shoe repairman, and… ground round instead of roast beef. And I’ll tell you something else: It isn’t going to bed with a man that proves you’re in love with him; it’s getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts!
Yours, Mine & Ours (1968)
Henry Fonda as Frank Beardsley

I am a poem trying to find my structure. I fall apart so easily, yet my kernel of truth remains indestructible. In my teenage years, I envied porcelain doll girls, the kind of girls that might shatter, the girls that people are protective of. I was always a rag doll. I am incapable of staying broken, but I’m so much more fragile than I seem. It’s hard being such a soft girl in a world with so many sharp edges. It feels like I’m forever mending myself back together again.

In my late teens, Tim Burton gave me the movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. I mean, not me personally, but I related hard to his ragdoll character, Sally. I think I took too many pages out of her playbook in my love life, though. I’ve wasted so much time trying to help clueless men achieve their dreams, like I’m just a supporting role in my own life.

I am doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs

My love doesn’t just stay up late, it gets up early when needed. It walks through the fire and it gets the job done. My love is whole-hearted, messy, chaotic, and intense. It doesn’t give up easy. My love is not suffering, it is hard work. It is vulnerability. It risks all, gives all, goes all in. It is a full partnership. My love is a double dog dare to dive off the cliff hand in hand. It is rising to the challenge whether epic or mundane.

I want romance, but romance isn’t in finding someone willing to die for me, it’s in finding someone willing to live for me. Not someone willing to make me their life, but someone willing to do the work on themselves, so they can show up and stick around. I won’t be wooed with grand gestures. I’m looking for something more sustainable. Face your demons. Get yourself some therapy. Don’t show me what you can endure, show me what you can solve. Show up for yourself, then you can show up for me.

Seriously, step one is showing up. I’ve had more than enough love letters from people who like to imagine what I’d be like in their lives but don’t make any room for me and don’t bother to show up in mine. I’m not looking for a collaborator to write fiction with. I want someone to share my actual, often-boring, everyday life with. There’s more to being available than just being single. Don’t waste my time if you can’t show up in real life.

When other people were writing me love notes, the Work Bestie won me over because he showed up. Consistently, and repeatedly. Early in our friendship, he practically made a pest of himself, always pulling me out of the office for no good reason. Sometimes he would follow me around the building while I was trying to get work done and I never could figure out what he wanted, but I just kind of got used to him always being there, until he wasn’t.

When we became friends again, it took more effort. It took both of us making the decision to be there in each other’s lives. Long distance is challenging, but working together helped. It was definitely handy that someone else was paying for the gas when he drove up. It was less convenient that we had entire workshops to run during our weekends together. It’s never been easy, but we made it work. We still managed to make time to be together. What we lacked in quantity, we made up for in quality.

Valentine’s Day 2020 I got far more dressed up than I normally would for work at what was basically an educational construction site. He was emphatically private, particularly in regards to colleagues knowing much about his love life and so I was respectfully discreet, but still, it was Valentine’s Day after all. It’s not every day you get to openly celebrate being in love.

Our non-profit is small and underfunded, which is to say the staff is small and outrageously underpaid, so we all work there as sort of a non-lucrative side hustle. The job is a labor of love and we all have to pay our bills another way. He works a very respectable nine-to-five gig in San Diego County, in addition to the workplace we share. Which is to say with Valentine’s Day being a Friday he wouldn’t be able to join us until after his regular work day and the long drive.

The Cajon Pass is a narrow artery through which traffic flows between Los Angeles and the Mojave Desert. Flow is a generous term, in that if it were an actual artery I’m pretty sure the host would have died by now. My feelings about the need for a commuter train running through that corridor could fill several posts by itself. What you need to know is that on Friday nights it is almost always cursed with Vegas Traffic. Some of the traffic is people going to the Colorado River and other points east of L.A. There is always commercial trucking, too. Regardless of destination, it is all called Vegas Traffic. Certain holidays and events draw more Angelenos to Vegas than others. Valentine’s Day weekend is a big one. So. Much. Traffic.

It was made worse by accidents that afternoon and as romantic as I am, I care far more about his well-being than any Hallmark holiday. I let him know that reliable reports indicated it would be an excruciatingly long drive up that night. It would be far wiser to make the drive in the morning. Straight to work. I sadly wished him a happy Valentine’s Day over the phone and proceeded with the disappointing task of undressing myself like unwrapping a gift that no longer had any recipient to anticipate. No point in staying all dressed up at that point. We would still be together all weekend. It’s just extra nice to spend Valentine’s Day with your special someone.

Later that night, the Work Bestie terrified first my teenaged children (who were wide awake, but not expecting company) and then me, by showing up after I was sound asleep, and just walking in like he owned the place. It would have been an easier drive in the morning, but sometimes we do hard things for the people we love. It scared the beejeebees out of me, waking up in the middle of the night to some grown man standing next to my bed in the dark, and his sense of humor is just malicious enough I’m sure he relished being able to scare us all so easily. I couldn’t be mad though. It was Valentine’s Day and he showed up. That was all that I’d wanted.

We’ve never been over the top romantic. Certainly not as just friends, but not really as a couple either. Ours was a quiet courtship. That always felt more sustainable to me, more genuine. He and I, we know how to build, how to buttress. For years we shored each other up through one crisis or another. It wasn’t flashy, but it takes time to build something right. We know how to place a keystone, even if we are each skittish about leaning in enough to make it work. With the right partner, even this fragile girl could build something to last through the ages. The arch is strong.

When the bones are good, the rest don’t matter
Yeah, the paint could peel, the glass could shatter
Let it break, ’cause you and I remain the same
When there ain’t a crack in the foundation
Baby, I know any storm we’re facing will
Blow right over while we stay put
The house don’t fall when the bones are good
Maren Morris
Bones

Maren Morris – The Bones (Official Video)

Romantics and Realists

these men who practice love like performance art. They give a clever representation but not the thing itself. They pride themselves on their self-inflicted martyrdom as they poke at their hearts like a kid pressing a bruise, aimlessly fascinated with the sensation.

The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.
A. F. G. Bell
In Portugal

I grew up hoping to someday find the Gomez to my Morticia, a partner in crime to have grand adventures with. Instead, I somehow ended up playing Sally to clueless Jacks. For much of the English speaking world romance is exemplified by Romeo and Juliet, a fictional tale of two impulsive teenagers making bad decisions ‘til death do them part. Portugal, on the other hand, has Pedro and Inês, a real life king and his dead queen.

Pedro I of Portugal was a 14th century king. Like most royalty his wife was chosen for him as a matter of political alliance while he was still a prince. The legend has it that on the very day of his bride’s arrival in the Portuguese court he fell, head over heels, madly, and eternally in love with Inês de Castro… his bride’s lady-in-waiting. Awkward.

Pedro did as a prince was supposed to and produced a viable heir with his assigned wife, but also carried on his extramarital activities rather indiscreetly. His father, King Afonso IV, had hoped the infatuation with Inês would wear off, but it did not. When Pedro’s wife, Constance of Castille, died, the king tried to remarry the prince to politically appropriate women, but Pedro refused to accept any woman other than Inês and Afonso was having none of that.

Afonso had banished Inês from the court a few years before the death of Constance of Castille. Still, Pedro refused to marry anyone else. Pedro went so far as to leave the Portuguese court to live with Inês in Coimbra, where they had four children and a reportedly very happy life together. Determined to separate the lovers, King Afonso IV had Inês brutally assassinated. This led to all kinds of drama, but eventually the old king died and the heartbroken Pedro inherited his father’s throne. At which point, he had Inês exhumed and declared queen posthumously.

With so much macabre drama in the history books it stands to reason that Portuguese literature would have to take it even further. So while the rest of Europe was content to have a Romantic movement, the Portuguese-speaking world had to take it a step further and develop Ultrarromantismo, Ultra-Romanticism. There is this underlying philosophy that true love is selfless, is spiritual. Any pleasure would pollute this perfect love.

sau·da·de: noun, a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia that is supposedly characteristic of the Portuguese or Brazilian temperament.

Part of the assigned reading while I was studying in Portugal was José Matias by José Maria de Eça de Queirós. It is a self-aware exaggeration of ultrarromantismo. It infuriated me.

I have known men like the fictional José Matias – these men who say love like it is a noun or an adjective, never learning the exhausting and exhilarating ways love exists as a verb – these men who practice love like performance art. They give a clever representation but not the thing itself. They pride themselves on their self-inflicted martyrdom as they poke at their hearts like a kid pressing a bruise, aimlessly fascinated with the sensation.

I have been loved this way. It can be intoxicating to be gazed at with longing, not leered at but gazed at. It feels like something pure, something sweet and spiced with tragedy. I have even had long-distance correspondences with such men who have excellent taste in love songs but, at the end of the day, choose to have sighs on their lips instead of kisses. They keep their distance and then fabricate stories of heartbreak, each as their own playwright, director, and cast. I am just the stage on which another of their tragedy plays is set.

Matias dedicated his life to this perfect love such that the rest of his life rotted like a fruit basket being saved for a special occasion. Not only did a man of intelligence, education, and means amount to nothing productive, he buzzed about Elisa’s life like a housefly. She does well enough, with husbands and lovers stepping up where Matias would not. Still, I can’t help but think such romance is more cruelty than gift. It condemns anything more satisfying than emotional starvation as vulgar.

I am grateful that Eça de Queirós ultimately holds Matias up as an anti-role model. I feared that his pointless devotion would be presented as a virtue. These romantics built altars on which to sacrifice their own hearts and would have their beloved condemned to a life of loneliness and longing or toppled from their pedestals as soon as things got real. I don’t know if Elisa ever found someone she could love and be loved by, but at least she didn’t sit alone in futile devotion. Suffering is not love.

Longing can be a beautiful thing, but I don’t think that I care much for Saudade. I like longing as a form of anticipation, a chance to enjoy how delicious something is, even before you taste it. I enjoy longing as an appetizer, not a meal. I’m not saying I can’t relate to fruitless longing, I’m saying I prefer having over wanting. I’m not interested in all the drama, star-crossed lovers, dead queens. Mundane partnership is so much more thrilling to me. Even in Portugal, ultrarromantismo ultimately gave way to Literary Realism.

She stepped inside of me, she said don’t ever lie to me
This heart of mine can be yours
Yea that’s what she said
Everlast
Love for Real

Everlast – Love for Real (Live @ Overdrive)

Bom Dia!

It had become my neighborhood, and I was overjoyed to participate in my new community, even if that was mostly by greeting people like the untrained labrador retriever that I am in the depths of my soul.

“Hello and good-bye.” What else is there to say? Our language is much larger than it needs to be.
Kurt Vonnegut
Jailbird

There is something to be said for a comfortable routine. Back when I was taking community college classes online, I found it very difficult to get any schoolwork done if my now ex-husband was home. I would take my laptop to the local Starbucks and handle business there. This was back when Starbucks was a cozy place designed to encourage lingering about, with comfy chairs, plentiful outlets, and fast-enough wifi. I often joked that if I ever completed my associate degree, I would owe the coffee giant a line on my diploma or at the very least special thanks (thank you Victorville Starbucks).

The coffee is okay. It keeps me awake, and that’s enough most days. What I loved the most was that they always made me feel like Norm on Cheers. Everybody knew my name, and they seemed genuinely happy to see me. And I know it’s a corporate strategy, but I’ll be darned if it doesn’t work like a charm. In an interview with Oprah, Toni Morrison talked about the importance of being demonstrably happy to see her children. It makes a difference. I am still that child. I will do almost anything for people who make me feel like they are happy to see me.

Our professor is not a morning person, so we didn’t have class until the afternoon. In the morning, my roommates and I, in varying combinations, would go to the farmer’s market¹, the swimming hole, the regular market, a Loja Chinesa², or some combination of the above before class. Ponta Delgada is a very walkable town, occasionally steep, but as well laid out as it can be with that topography, I reckon.

Totally blending in with the locals

I don’t know much Portuguese, but I used my limited lexicon with great enthusiasm. I greeted every person I met on these morning outings with a heartfelt “bom dia!” I felt like Belle in the opening number of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, except these people had no idea who the crazy lady, with the thick American accent, greeting them so ecstatically was. Fortunately, the Portuguese seem to be a very warm and welcoming people, and as said above, we like it when people are happy to see us.

I’ve never been any good at blending in. I was never going to pass for a local, but still, I felt a part of the community. I felt seen at my little pizza place around the corner. I felt camaraderie with the seniors braving the chilly Atlantic waters every morning. I had favorite stalls in the Farmer’s Market. It had become my neighborhood, and I was overjoyed to participate in my new community, even if that was mostly by greeting people like the untrained labrador retriever that I am in the depths of my soul. What a delight to say good morning to someone in a language that is not your own and have them respond in kind as if you belong after all.

I was genuinely happy to see every person I crossed paths with during those first weeks in Portugal. It was such an unlikely miracle that I, the always-broke girl, the living-my-life-like-I’m-in-a-telenovela tragic girl, the always-struggled-with-school girl, was somehow studying abroad, and on this island paradise I hadn’t known had existed just a few months earlier. I was so happy to be there and so happy for these strangers that they could be there, too. Our very existence in that unlikely place was enough to be giddy about. Squee!

Little town, it’s a quiet village
Every day like the one before
Little town, full of little people
Waking up to say…
Beauty and the Beast Soundtrack

Beauty And The Beast – Belle [European Portuguese]

A daily market with a regular address, not the weekly street fair type I’m used to in California. ↩︎
This literally translates to “Chinese Store,” and can refer to any number of dollar store type establishments. ↩︎

Hey Jealousy

I can see he’s beautiful, but there’s no pull. He’s like a brother to me. Also, I knew he liked her. It seemed like benevolent sabotage, setting up two attractive people I wasn’t interested in to keep one of them away from the person I was interested in.

I’m really hoping he’s being genuine because I can already tell he isn’t the kind of guy a girl gets a simple crush on. He’s the kind of guy you fall hard for, and the thought of that terrifies me. I don’t really want to fall hard for anyone at all, especially someone who’s only making an effort because he thinks I’m easy. I also don’t want to fall for someone who has already branded himself hopeless. But I’m curious. So curious.
Colleen Hoover
Hopeless

It was Christmas Eve, almost exactly a year after the night I first felt that lightning bolt of attraction to my Work Bestie when he called me out of the blue. Almost as suddenly as we’d stopped being in each other’s lives, we were back. He’d call for no particular reason, and we’d talk like we used to.

I talked to him parked in my car with groceries melting behind me. He talked to me on speakerphone while staying up late working on a project for class. One night, I sat at the base of a playground slide and laid back so I could see stars while we talked. I got so lost in that moment that years later, I found myself going by that park and thinking of the night we’d hung out there. Then, halfway through my private reminiscence, I remembered that he’d never been to that park. It was just a phone call. I remember it like he was lying beside me when we talked. It seemed like we talked about everything in the upcoming months, but still, he didn’t tell me he was single.

Long ago, when I thought I would never want anything more than friendship, I explained to the Work Bestie that he had no genitals. In my defense, he had been flirting with me; this seemed like my best protection at the time. I mean, maybe he did have genitalia, maybe he didn’t, it’s just a thing I do in my head. Not that genitals have ever been particularly attractive to me, but it’s symbolic. It keeps me within my own boundaries to assume that all people in relationships are built like Ken or Barbie underneath their clothes. Sex and romance are intertwined for me, and taking one off the table helps to remind me that the other is not an option. This is how I told him that I don’t consider him a threat, though in retrospect, blurting out a bizarre panicked version of, “you don’t scare me,” might be a solid sign that someone scares me.

After legally separating from my ex-husband, my daughter and I shared a bedroom at my friend’s house. This arrangement gave me enough security in my custody of the kids to finally move out after years of being broken up under the same roof. It did not give me much privacy, though. Often, I would go out to my car parked in front of the house to take calls so as not to disrupt anyone else in the crowded house.

It was one of those nights, talking on the phone in my parked car, when the Work Bestie told me he had a penis. It was the perfect inside joke to tell me he was single. He had me laughing until tears rolled down my cheeks. I wanted to be salty with him for going so long without telling me, but he’s impossible to stay upset with. I didn’t need to know the details, such as they were, but he was single. He wasn’t making any moves, it was so much better than that. He was talking to me about ALL the things, and we were friends again.

Historically, I’ve been inclined to give my romantic interests plenty of room to show me who they are. I’d rather be disappointed early on than heartbroken later. There’s an insecurity in me regarding the Work Bestie that fosters a jealousy I don’t like in myself. I’m not usually possessive, but he has been the only exception in so many ways, not all of them good.

Or our work campus, we will always have one of those

We were somewhere in that friendship revisited when another colleague mentioned his attractiveness as if she might have had intentions in that direction. In response, I set her up with a ridiculously good-looking male friend (pictured at the top of the post, in case you don’t know how ridiculous I’m talking about).

I’m fortunately not attracted to him. I can see he’s beautiful, but there’s no pull. He’s like a brother to me. Also, I knew he liked her. It seemed like benevolent sabotage, setting up two attractive people I wasn’t interested in to keep one of them away from the person I was interested in. As far as I know, their date was pleasant, but not the sort that leads to a second. That wasn’t the part that was important to me, anyway.

I’m unsure how far I would have gone to keep other women from flirting with the Work Bestie. I’m not like this, except for when I am, I guess. Jealousy seems so pointless. If I have to be all petty and suspicious to keep a relationship, is that really a relationship I even want? I wasn’t even rightfully in a position to keep him from seeing other people. I was still on the fence about whether or not I wanted to risk weirding the friendship by doing anything with him myself. Maybe I cared who he dated, maybe I didn’t. I wasn’t sure.

I definitely wasn’t okay with him seeing anybody else at our work, though. His hugs and that campus were the closest thing I had to a sanctuary, to a place where I felt safe and centered and like nothing could hurt me. I really wasn’t sure how I would feel about him dating someone else, but if it weren’t good, I would need our campus to be a place of comfort, not where he was holding someone else’s hand.

I know there’s no form
And no labels to put on
To this thing we keep
And dip into when we need
And I don’t have the right
To ask where you go at night
But the waves hit my head
To think someone’s in your bed
I get a little bit Genghis Khan
I don’t want you to get it on
With nobody else but me
Miike Snow
Genghis Khan

Miike Snow – Genghis Khan (Official Video)

The Rooster

I was there long enough and involved enough, that I can’t help but feel some affiliation- like Portugal is partly mine and I am partly Portugal’s.

There are symbols of that place that I greet like old friends now. I’m so happy to see them, even if they make me a little homesick for a place I never quite called home.

There is a powerful need for symbolism, and that means the architecture must have something that appeals to the human heart.
Kenzo Tange

Once upon a time,
a pilgrim was walking to Santiago de Compostela as many pilgrims have done over the centuries. This pilgrim had the misfortune of arriving in Barcelos the same day that the silver had been stolen from an important, wealthy man.

A stranger with no one to vouch for him, the pilgrim was as poor as he was pious and truly had nothing but his own word in his defense. He was also the only suspect. So it came to pass that he was promptly arrested, convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.

The day he was scheduled to be hanged, he begged so earnestly for one last chance to plead with the judge that the guards took pity on him and took him to the judge’s house. The judge was having a dinner party that evening, and there were guests in their finest attire, and a great feast was laid out on the table. Unwashed, disheveled, and shackled, the pilgrim threw himself on the judge's mercy. It was to no avail. The judge declared that the hanging would go on as planned.

Just as the guards were going to take the pilgrim away, he pointed to the roasted chicken on the table and looked the judge right in the eyes as he said, “As truly as I tell you I am innocent, I tell you now that this cock will crow three times at the moment I am hanged.” The dinner guests all laughed at this ridiculous claim, and the pilgrim was taken directly to the gallows.

Much to the shock of the judge and his guests, the roast chicken did stand up and crow, not once, not twice, but three times. Realizing he’d sent an innocent man to his death, the judge ran from his house to the gallows, praying it wasn’t too late.

Though the executioner had attempted to hang the pilgrim, a flaw in the rope saved his neck. They were just setting up for a second attempt when the judge arrived and insisted that the pilgrim be set free at once.

And so it is that this rooster, Galo de Barcelos, has become a symbol of faith and justice and of Portugal itself. Like any oral tradition, there are countless small variations, but also details that remain consistent. Colorfully painted figurines of this rooster can be found in gift shops carrying Portuguese kitsch and they are supposed to bring good luck to your home.

Studying abroad is a strange space, somewhere between visiting a place and living there. I lived my life in Portugal the same way as in California. I went to my classes. I hung out with my friends. I ran errands. I did chores. I worked from home. Sometimes, I say I lived there because my daily life was very real and very there. Sometimes, I say I visited because I still had a home in California that I knew I’d return to. However you phrase it, I was there long enough and involved enough, that I can’t help but feel some affiliation- like Portugal is partly mine and I am partly Portugal’s.

There are symbols of that place that I greet like old friends now. I’m so happy to see them, even if they make me a little homesick for a place I never quite called home. Of course, there is the rooster. There is also the ornate Manueline architecture that is so distinctly Portuguese. And the flexible cork that they use like leather to make purses and backpacks, and from which the little coin purse I bought in Lisbon is made.

Portuguese pavement is my favorite, though. I still marvel that the Portuguese can get anywhere on foot, mostly because the sidewalks are so stunning that I wanted to stop and admire them every few steps and also because they have worn quite smooth in some places after centuries of people walking on them. They can be treacherously slippery, especially in hilly Lisbon.

Ducks and a rooster napping in the grass under a bush — The big, black, rooster napping with the ducks

A photo of lush hydrangeas blooming in the foreground with a duck pond and manicured lawn in the background, and old buildings on the horizon. — The big, black, rooster napping with the ducks

The Azores have all the symbols of Portugal and some of their own. The hydrangeas were very showy while I was there in June. Between the live ones in full bloom, the delicately embroidered ones on tea towels and aprons, and representations on postcards and magnets and anything else you could hope to buy in a souvenir shop, it’s hard to hate on them. Unfortunately, they are as invasive as they are iconic.

Romantic gardens still abound on the island of São Miguel. The local economy flourished in the 19th century, and wealthy merchants wanted to emulate nobility. There’s a certain recipe to follow for these gardens, beyond just having exotic plants. They took one of these, one of those, carefully curating specimens and completing collections. There are no ancient ruins on the island of São Miguel, on account of not being settled by humans until the 15th century. That’s okay, if you can’t grow your own ruins or grottos, custom-built is fine. More than a century later, some are rather convincing, too.

The university where I attended classes has its own romantic garden, and lush hydrangeas (and modern facilities too). Best of all was the one big, black, rooster whose strutting presence on the grounds, compounded by the souvenir tchotchkes, sent me down the Galo de Barcelos rabbit hole in the first place. I just had to know what the Portuguese obsession with roosters was all about.

I never did believe in miracles
But I’ve a feeling it’s time to try
I never did believe in the ways of magic
But I’m beginning to wonder why
Fleetwood Mac
You Make Loving Fun

A New World Woman in an Old World Town

If, as Billy Joel says, “Los Angelenos all come from somewhere,” the Azores are the bookend, a place where everybody has gone or is going or is missing someone who has left. Those islands are shaped by emigration as much as California is by immigration.

In Los Angeles, by the time you’re 35, you’re older than most of the buildings.
Delia Ephron

I grew up in North Hollywood, in neighborhoods that used to be Mexico, which once belonged to Spain. My family’s quarter-acre has been in three countries over the past 200 years, and that’s not even considering that it has never stopped being Chumash, Tongva, and Fernandeño Tataviam land. Portugal was born in 1143, but not baptized (papal approval) until 1146 and it has not changed its borders significantly since.

My state’s history and my family’s both began in the late 1840s. My mother’s great-grandparents were the children of Irish famine immigrants. They found their way to Los Angeles in 1912. That is as far back as my history goes. My father and his parents came to Los Angeles in the 1960s, after the whole family had spent most of a decade traveling between the Central Valley and Northern Mexico as part of the Bracero program. Neither side of the family talks much about what was left behind. My family history, as I know it, begins in California, or at least on the journey to California.

This is my heritage. I am a self-proclaimed Irish-American Chicana. When I am abroad and asked where I am from, I answer California. My sense of Americanness is that of the immigrant. I feel simultaneously an outsider to WASP culture and most of U.S. History, and yet a fervent attachment to California, the only home I know. My heritage is in hand-me-down stories of Ireland and Mexico as they existed when my families left them, not how they are today.

My heritage is in Los Angeles, where my families converged. According to DNA testing, my ancestry spans three continents and a multitude of ethnicities, including 2% Portuguese. I have no family connection to Portuguese culture, though. It may be a small part of my ancestry, but not my heritage. I was warmly welcomed there as a stranger and that says a lot about the Portuguese in general, and Azoreans in particular..

Compared to the rest of Portugal, the Azores are still relatively new, yet compared to California, they are ancient. The Igreja Matriz de São Sebastião has been a functional church since the 16th century, so many generations, nearly 500 years of people coming and going as if this sort of thing happens all the time. Los Angeles is an industry town; buildings go up and down like set dressing. In Ponta Delgada, the farmer’s market kept the same layout when it moved underground during renovations, changing only as necessary..

The mountains across the street from my grandmother’s apartment grew twelve inches the morning of the Northridge quake, and I’ve long thought that was one of the most Los Angeles things ever to happen. Even the mountains here can change overnight. There is something incomprehensibly stable about the Azores. They have earthquakes, even volcanoes, and still manage a sort of continuity that is entirely foreign to me.

Michael Connelly says of my home town, “Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really dropped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically — any way you want to look at it — everybody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.” He’s not unique in this observation. If, as Billy Joel says, “Los Angelenos all come from somewhere,” the Azores are the bookend, a place where everybody has gone or is going or is missing someone who has left. Those islands are shaped by emigration as much as California is by immigration. The people are friendlier than in Los Angeles, but their stories are the same, just told at different ends.

There is a pizza place near my apartment in Ponta Delgada. Nothing there is fast. I’d often order a bite to eat and a Kima to take away. When I went alone, I was invited by someone ten to twenty years my senior to join them at the table next to the cigarette machine. I accepted the invitation and made conversation while waiting for my inexplicably slow food.

Pedro had returned to Ponta Delgada now that he is retired. He had been a truck driver in Canada for nearly his entire adult life. He had been born in Ponta Delgada, but he left as soon as he could get out. His mother owned a big house in town, and Pedro told her not to sell it. I found it particularly revealing that he said he told her, not asked or advised her. Decades later, Pedro still seems annoyed that she sold the house, even while admitting that it was a lot for her to take care of alone.

On another occasion I sat for a long time with Nelly. She did not speak English as well as Pedro, but her English was still better than my Portuguese. She used her phone to show me pictures of a statue and swans in a park not far from here and ducks named (by her) Fernando and Chuka. Nelly owned a big house in Ponta Delgada and would rent rooms to people and give them rides anywhere they wanted.

Then Nelly asked me, “we are friends?” There is only one correct answer when a sweet older woman takes your hands in hers and asks this. I affirmed that we were. She showed me pictures of her face bruised and swollen and explained that her husband had died and her son had moved away a long time ago. She had a partner, but he… She made a punching gesture and showed me lumps where her jaw bone should be smooth. She told me, “this is not my face.”

Nelly was planning to move to Lisbon. Her friends thought her crazy to move away, but she wants to be far away from her ex-partner and is hopeful doctors there can fix her jaw. I was married to a man who brags that he never hit me, and friends and family thought I should stay too. He was only mean when he’d had too much to drink, or not enough to drink, or a rough time at work, or was stressed about something. Sometimes, he was great though. It can seem like madness to leave a good house behind, but most of us are willing to jump from high windows when we know the house is on fire. And we’ll jump out of entire countries when they are on fire, too.

I have met people like this in Los Angeles: people who left home in search of adventure, or safety, or a fresh start, some who were saving up to go back someday, and some who knew they would never return. Despite Billy Joel’s claims, Los Angeles is where I am from. I grew up in a city that people run away to, and now I know what it is like to sit with them in a place where people are from.

Drivin’ down your freeways
Midnight alleys roam
Cops in cars, the topless bars
Never saw a woman
So alone, so alone
The Doors
L.A. Woman

The Doors – L.A. Woman

Golden Girls with Tarnished Pasts

I jokingly declared us The Real Cool Kids. We were the four musketeers. We were the Golden Girls, only with a cranky Korean man instead of an elderly Sicilian mother.

I often feel like an outsider wherever I go, so I’m always attracted to stories about identity and the meaning of home.
Chloe Zhao

When I received my acceptance letter to Berkeley, there was this overwhelming combination of shock and disbelief. I kept re-reading the email, just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. It was really addressed to me. They really were letting me in. Crazy talk.

The linguistics department is solid. The location is perfect. Also, bragging rights. There were so many ways in which this was a dream come true. But also, though, I was sure I was going to be so lonely. I was moving away from friends, from family, from the man I begrudgingly loved. I was giving up a lot for this dream school.

Also, with that name-brand prestige comes a population of smart kids. These kids were valedictorians with better than 4.0 GPAs (‘cause that’s a thing somehow). These are the kids who went to summer school not to make up their classes but to get ahead. I’m used to being the weird kid, a little bit on the fringe of every social group I work my way into; this was gonna be a next-level mismatch, though. I was about to submerge myself in academic overachievers less than half my age. It’s okay, I wasn’t going to Berkeley to make friends. I know the drill. Just keep my head down and get it done. I could make friends after graduation.

Berkeley was not what I expected. They weren’t kidding about looking for a resilient student body. They have a large and fairly well-supported population of transfer students. Before my first semester began, my inbox was filled with information for EOPS, student parents, transfer students, Latinx recruitment and retention, reentry students, etc. I have some criticism about how the university seems more keen to have black and brown students in marketing than in the classrooms, but that’s a whole other topic. For now, I just want to focus on the ways in which I found myself home on campus.

I have been making friends since my first semester on campus with surprising ease. These classes are hard. We bonded over the shared stresses, the shared geekery, and the simple happiness and seeing someone who seems happy to see you. Oddly, my time at Berkeley has been some of the least lonely days of my life. These nerds are my nerds. The friendships are somewhat subject-specific, but still so much more than I expected.

Still, I was nervous about Portugal. What if I ended up rooming with some poor girl who was so excited to get to be away from home finally and then got stuck with a roommate her mom’s age? My very existence could be a total buzzkill. I worried that everyone would be Portuguese or majoring in Portuguese, or eighteen years old, rich, worldly, or any combination of things I am definitely not. In the end, I think all those traits were present in the program, but not overwhelmingly. More definitive in the group were kindness, curiosity, and enthusiasm. We were all pretty excited to be in friggin’ Portugal for the summer.

All the hugs!

Also, four of us were over forty. That was unexpected. I mean, I spent my entire childhood painfully aware that being the same age as someone was not enough common ground to forge a friendship. Still, undergrads in their forties had to take a windy path to get there. To completely bastardize Tolstoy, traditional students are all alike, but nontraditional students are nontraditional in their own unique way. I proceeded with caution, worried as always that at some point, I would be deemed just too weird to sit next to at lunch.

I love the kids that I went to Portugal with, no doubt. I have so much admiration for their intelligence, tenacity, and bravery. They are figuring stuff out so much earlier in life than I did, and I can’t wait to see how they change the world. It’s just that there is an incredible bond forged between us mature students. As I got to know them, I learned I was far from alone in having made choices I was not proud of along my way. There was so much I never felt like I had to explain when I was with them. They just got it.

I jokingly declared us The Real Cool Kids. We were the four musketeers. We were the Golden Girls, only with a cranky Korean man instead of an elderly Sicilian mother. Except we were, all four of us, too old for anybody else’s crap like Sophia, droppers of killer punchlines like Dorothy, sweet and kind like Rose, and known to have walked on the wild side like Blanche. Even if the trip had been without incident, which it definitely wasn’t, I would always love these people. After all that we’ve been through they are like family to me now.

Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down a road and back again
Your heart is true; you’re a pal and a confidant
Andrew Gold
Thank You for Being a Friend

The Year We Weren’t Friends

Sometimes you have to give up on people. Not because you don’t care but because they don’t. A person’s actions will tell you everything you need to know. Love yourself enough to say goodbye to those who don’t make time for you or don’t know how to love you back. Let go of what hurts, even if it hurts to let go.
Jennifer Green

It was my personal ice age, the year we weren’t friends. The Work Bestie was still the first person I wanted to tell all my things to. I aced that awful physiology class, just like he’d said I would. As soon as the grade was posted, I took out my phone to let him know he was right, this time. Then I just put it away without typing anything. I was only allowing myself to have work-relevant interactions. For unrelated reasons, he had cut back dramatically on his involvement at our shared workplace. I don’t think he was on campus more than twice that whole year. So there wasn’t a lot of work-related stuff that needed to be said. There was so much silence that year.

He had become my best friend, but he was not my only friend. In fact, we have a number of friends and acquaintances in common through work. I heard from multiple sources that he and his girlfriend had broken up. I had very mixed feelings about that. Before my lightning-strike moment, when I had more appropriate thoughts, I’d seen a few things that made me sure I didn’t want a relationship like theirs. To each their own, though. After the lightning strike, hearing that he was single was a little exciting, but I didn’t want it to be. He wasn’t around anymore, and I wasn’t looking for anything in general, and I don’t mess around with younger, or with colleagues, or long distance either. Nope. Nope. Nope… But, maybe, though.

The Work Bestie was at work for a weekend towards the end of the-year-we-weren’t-friends. We were both staying on campus again that night. I figured that would be when he would tell me about the breakup, but he didn’t. We used to talk about ALL the things. His silence on the subject was kinda weird. I pressed a little, in a “do you have anything you’d like to tell me?” kinda way. Nothing. Another colleague even started to say something, and the Work Bestie shut him down like he didn’t want anyone to say anything in front of me. At that point, I was starting to get offended.

So this how we are now? Fine.

Clearly, he was single, but I guess I was the only person on the planet not allowed to know about it? Did he think that the instant I found out, I would jump his bones in front of God and everyone? Like, dude, you’re cute, but you ain’t that cute. Whatevs. I didn’t think I had ever been inappropriate with him such that he would have to worry about me so much as knowing he was single. I mean, I thought we were more than just colleagues and that I would at least make the long list of friends he told about his breakup, but I was wrong.

He and I hadn’t become friends so much as we had discovered an old friend the day we met. We may not have known it that day, but from the very beginning everything seemed to fit effortlessly every time we talked. It had been so easy to fall into each other’s lives, and so painful to put a proper and respectful distance between us. I couldn’t understand why it was so hard to go back to being us. I wasn’t trying to start anything. I just wanted my friend back. I guess that’s not what he wanted, though.

I didn’t have time for this nonsense. I was focused on my plan to get out of my ex-husband’s house. The ex and I had been in separate bedrooms for a decade, but the man had no interest in working with me toward separate households. Thankfully, friends helped me find and retain a lawyer. I finally filed for divorce, and the kids and I were able to move in with a friend at the end of November 2015. I was busy changing an entire adult life in progress. I had work, school, kids, and divorce. I was busy, just not too busy to miss talking with the Work Bestie. I had liked thinking we were friends. I really hate not being friends with him is all.

No, you don’t judge me
‘Cause if you did, baby, I would judge you too
‘Cause I’ve got issues, but you got ’em too
So give ’em all to me, and I’ll give mine to you
Bask in the glory of all our problems
‘Cause we got the kind of love it takes to solve ’em
Yeah, I got issues
And one of them is how bad I need ya
Julia Michaels
Issues

Julia Michaels – Issues

Something a Lot Like Home

It is strange the extent to which when I am at home I daydream constantly about traveling and when I am traveling all I want is a place to nest. I wanted to see my home away from home, unpack, imagine where I’d take my morning coffee, etc.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.
Maya Angelou

The internet is great for researching weather and fun tourist spots. I try to research etiquette, too, though, in my experience there is no one etiquette. I’ve never been anywhere that is really a cultural monolith without any socioeconomic, religious, or ethnic variation. It’s still helpful to read about how to be on my best behavior abroad, but being kind and respectful almost always involves a certain amount of improvisation. Research helps, but it’s not enough.

I remain both frustrated and soothed by the constraints of predictability, so I seek adventures and then research the crap out of them in advance. What I couldn’t research at all were the things that were probably going to impact me the most. As a student, I have no say in my lodging or my housemates. I didn’t know my neighborhood or my amenities. I could assume it would be reasonably close to the campus and have those things students reasonably need, like wifi, but who’s to say what the deciding parties (Berkeley Study Abroad and Study in Portugal Network (SiPN) actually deem reasonable.

We arrived at the Ponta Delgada Airport as a cluster of acquaintances and strangers. Some of us had met briefly at an orientation (that seemed forever ago by the time we arrived). Some of us had some Berkeley swag visible. These things helped us to identify each other, and we all sort of clustered together. None of us really knew what to expect, and the person who was picking us up was on her way, but not there yet.

Some of us took the opportunity to buy SIM cards and/or get coffee and snacks. Then our professor’s logistical assistant arrived and packed every one of us from that flight into a van that seemed too small for so many people and all the luggage we’d need for the next two months. Then we got to the narrow streets of the neighborhoods we’d be living in, and the van seemed much too big. Still, by some combination of miracle and superpowers our driver managed to distribute us to our new homes.

Most of the students seemed to be fairly evenly divided between two hostels, Thomas Place and, I think the other one was Marina Lounge, but I’m not sure. I wasn’t in either hostel. Our professor was very kind to us old broads, which is to say, the three women over forty in her class. She insisted that we be given the apartment that had been selected for her. This was a huge blessing.

The kids were able to check into their rooms right away, but our place wouldn’t be ready for hours. It is strange the extent to which when I am at home I daydream constantly about traveling and when I am traveling all I want is a place to nest. I wanted to see my home away from home, unpack, imagine where I’d take my morning coffee, etc. When the van dropped us off at our address, we were only allowed to hand off our bags.

For the next few hours we were set free to explore Ponta Delgada. We being myself and the one other woman in my household who had arrived early. Many of the students in this group were Portuguese majors or otherwise fluent, or at least semi-fluent, in Portuguese. Not my household. Neither one of us knew more than we had googled in the few short weeks leading up to this trip. Into the deep end we went, all at once.

Cool. Cool. Two mature women set loose in a strange town where neither of us know the language. Why not? Fortunately, we were still on something approximating company manners at that point, keeping our freak flags folded in tidy triangles out of each other’s view so very little mischief was had that day.

We discovered Café Central, which was kinda like an Azorean Denny’s. None of the food was great, but none of the food was bad either. The menu, and at least some of the staff were English-Portuguese bilingual and you could sit on the patio and people watch as if the whole town were going to walk by eventually. Also, their hours were the best on the island. We often ended up there on Sundays, when everything else was closed. Definitely not the best food on São Miguel, but they were hard to beat for convenience.

We headed back towards home, which is a weird thing to call some place you’ve never been, but even if it wasn’t yet that day, it definitely became something like home to me over the month. On the first day we weren’t quite sure where it was and made a few wrong turns. Google maps can only do so much if my reception is spotty and my reception is often spotty. Still somehow we found our way.

My traveling companion called dibs on the single room with the big bed, leaving me in the double with the roommate who was yet to arrive. I unpacked, satisfied both with my sense of being home and the knowledge that my grand adventure had finally begun. I think that eleven year old me would be proud to know that I was traveling the world, almost as much as she’d be horrified to know that I was in school in my forties.

Fearless was my middle name
But somewhere there, I lost my way
Everyone walks the same
Expecting me to step
The narrow path they’ve laid
R. E. M.
Walk Unafraid

First Aid Kit – Walk Unafraid (Official Video)

By Any Other Name

I was frustrated with our lack of a label but content with our relationship. I was more than content. I had the trademark arrogance of the happily coupled.

Loving life is easy when you are abroad, where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more a master of yourself than at home.
Hannah Arendt

The Work Bestie had been with me my first night in a new place since before he and I were a thing. He’d helped me move into my first place of my own after I left my ex-husband. That first night the Work Bestie stayed the night in my son’s room (while I slept in my own room). When the landlord sold that house, and I had to move, my first night in the new place the Work Bestie slept in my new living room (while I slept in my own room). And again, after we were already a thing, when I moved to northern California for school, he drove us up and stayed that first night, though that time he stayed in my room with me. At this point, I can’t imagine calling a place home before he stays the night there with me.

Our relationship started in the normal way, for me anyway. Through no effort of our own, we ended up spending time together. As a result, we found ourselves getting to know and growing fond of each other. We were flirty. We were friendly. We were friends. We were “friends who flirt.” Life happened. We grew closer. We grew apart. At some point, we were both single. We grew closer again. He was calling me more often. I really liked those calls. I kept urging him to visit me. He kept visiting. And seemingly inevitably, we ended up fooling around.

Fooling around with a friend is nice; you know and trust them. It’s also awful, in that there’s something to lose and no graceful exit if it ends badly. Neither one of us wanted to make it public or official. Not in the first couple of months. I didn’t want our mutual colleagues and friends to know about it if we fooled around for a minute and then one or both of us wanted to return to just friends. I wanted to be able to pretend it had never happened if he wasn’t going to be a significant other of some significance. Nobody wants to add embarrassment to pain. We discreetly transitioned from “friends who flirt” to “friends who fool around.”

Eventually, I let myself exhale a bit. It wasn’t an incident, it was a relationship. I mean, maybe not a permanent relationship, but it doesn’t have to be forever to be for real. I reluctantly accepted that I wasn’t saving myself any pain or embarrassment by the technicality of not sleeping with him. About six months into fooling around and about six years into knowing each other, I decided I was finally ready to go all the way. Whatever this was between us, it wasn’t going away soon.

He had been my rock for so long. He had been my one-man moving crew months after my legal separation when I moved from my friend’s house to a place of my own in 2016. He had been my most steadfast emotional support during my dad’s declining health, hospitalizations, and eventual death in 2017. That’s when we started fooling around, in 2017, a few months after I lost my dad. I mark my anniversary with the Work Bestie as that first time we fooled around in November 2017. I just didn’t figure out that we were a thing until May of 2018.

Like most relationships, we’ve had our ups and downs. There were times when he was so distant I would’ve dumped him if I could have gotten a hold of him. He wasn’t easy to be in a relationship with, but he has a way of making it up to you just before you give up on him entirely. In all fairness, I’m not a cakewalk myself. I was so skittish about getting trapped in anything but also deeply afraid of being abandoned. Still, through so much, somehow we endured.

By the time I was packing for Portugal, I was frustrated with our lack of a label but content with our relationship. I was more than content. I had the trademark arrogance of the happily coupled. I felt a little sad for all of my single friends. I wished they could know the joy of being booed up. I felt a little sad for most of my not-single friends, too, knowing in my heart of hearts that their boo couldn’t hold a candle to my bae.

Sometimes only Salt-N-Pepa lyrics get how you feel about your man

Shortly before Portugal, I tried to put a label on it. When normal people want to talk about their significant other, they can say, “Oh, my partner introduced me to such and such….” I, on the other hand, could say, “Oh, yeah, I know about that because my best friend/colleague, who I’ve been in a monogamous unofficial relationship with for the last few years, told me about that.” It was a mouthful, to say the least. I’d tried calling him my Cootie Buttbrain, “Yeah, my Cootie Buttbrain was totally into that for a while.” That seemed to invite more questions than it answered. If only there were a word for a person you’re not engaged or married to but are in a serious, long-term, monogamous relationship with. Oh, wait.

I don’t know why I was so nervous; more than four years into a relationship and nearly a decade into our friendship, I just wanted to call him my boyfriend. I’d had my own reservations about the relationship and then about the dignity, or lack thereof, of a woman of my age talking about someone as her “boyfriend” when it sounds like such a young person’s relationship status. But as mentioned above, the alternatives were much more awkward.

During his visit right before my trip, I tried to bring up the idea of putting a label on it. It was so silly at this point that we hadn’t. But I was nervous and awkward, and I was making it weird. So I sort of threw it out there saying that we should put a label on it, but when he seemed confused, I backpedaled like nobody’s business. Nothing to see here, folks. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to like her unless he doesn’t feel like liking her because that’s totally fine too, she doesn’t even really like being liked anyway, and it would probably be best if we just never mention this again. Something like that anyway.

So we didn’t officially put a label on it, but that didn’t change what we were. I mean, there were still some logistical concerns between us and Forever. That didn’t change that I was in love with my best friend. We had been some kind of romantic, sexual, monogamous thing for four and a half years. He was the person who already knew all the backstories so I could dive straight into the today-story when I had one to tell. He was the person who could talk me off of any ledge. He was who I leaned on. He was my person.

I’d totally fumbled talking to him about it but, while I was in Portugal, thousands of miles away, talking to people he would never meet, I started calling him my boyfriend. And you know what? The world didn’t end. Nobody gave me any side eye or asked if I wasn’t too old to have a “boyfriend.” I loved how that one word seemed to cover everything that the average person wanted to know about us. Maybe we would be together forever. Maybe we wouldn’t. But finally calling him my boyfriend felt really right, even if I hadn’t managed to tell him about it yet.

But if the world was ending
you’d come over, right?
You’d come over and you’d stay the night
Would you love me for the hell of it?
All our fears would be irrelevant
If the world was ending
you’d come over, right?
The sky’d be falling while I hold you tight
No, there wouldn’t be a reason why
we would even have to say goodbye
JP Saxe and Julia Michaels

JP Saxe – If the World Was Ending (Official Video) ft. Julia Michaels