Lived Through This

What I Learned From Living a Year in Airbnbs

First lesson: A house is not a home

Photos courtesy of the author.

When I was a senior in college, we went to Mexico. I remember the flight being turbulent, and that was the start of my lifelong fear of planes. I wondered if we’d plunge into the ocean and what that would feel like — metal breaking the surface, a body tearing its way down to the ocean floor. But I secreted my thoughts away, as I tended to do back then, because we were up in the air, drunk on cheap vodka and a future filled with possibility. It was spring 1997, and many of us already had jobs and graduate schools waiting for us on the other side of our cap and gown.

Until we put on our suits and collected our meager paychecks, we had a few months left of being children in a foreign country. And we’d jump on our beds, ignore the men carrying machine guns in daylight, and crowd ourselves into one of the many disco cabs in Acapulco. We spoke Spanish and chatted with the drivers who made their way to the clubs in the dark. We feasted on quesadillas — solamente cheese, I said, which made the whole table roar — toasted at Señor Frogs, and fought so hard we flew back to New York in an uncomfortable silence.

Before we exchanged barbs that weren’t so thinly veiled, we decided to go for a banana boat ride, which was really an inflatable plastic banana pulled by a dinghy through the water. My roommate negotiated the price and the guy warned us the banana could only fit four, not five. But we were ambivalent, arrogant Americans, and of course, we would never drown. We rode further out until the shore disappeared and was merely a speck on the horizon.

The banana flipped in the middle of the ocean. Somehow, all the air escaped and we were thrown into the water. We wore lifejackets, but I remember screaming. We were panicked and fighting with the guy who had warned us of the inevitable. I remember crowding the dinghy, which could barely fit two people much less six, and crying all the way back to shore.

We agreed five on a banana was a really fucking dumb idea.

But here’s what I remember most from that holiday — I cried out for my mother. I cried out for home. Because to me, they were always one and the same. Even though I had stopped loving her. Even though we were no longer speaking.

In the water, all I wanted was her.

Last year, it occurred to me that I’d spent much of the first four years I lived in California in my apartment. Those years were the hardest I’d ever known and everyone I thought I knew and loved was 3,000 miles away. No one tells you how swiftly you can be discarded. No one warns you that most friendships are sustained by proximity and convenience. I was no longer in the city so I was forgotten. A footnote in someone’s history.

There’s no greater hurt than the ground you’ve built giving way.

Before the pandemic, before we were shuttered into our homes and drove miles for a roll of toilet paper, I mapped out a year on the run. I’d live in the mountains, the desert, in a valley, and near the ocean. I would scramble on boulders and get lost in Joshua Tree Park. Hike my way up a mountain in the middle of a snowstorm, alone. See snakes, bobcats, and coyotes. Learn how to build a fire and sit in solitude. Befriend people I’d normally never encounter. Cleave through 120-degree heat like a body moving through water.

I would do all these things, but what I wanted most was to relinquish control. I wanted to feel uncomfortably comfortable, to get lost and be afraid. And settle in that fear because there’s no way out other than going through it.

Mostly, I wanted to leave my house. And I did until a sickness locked us all back in.

Pinyon Pines is a mountain town of 161 people. It’s a 40-minute drive up a mountain with an elevation of over 4,000 feet. It’s beautiful if you can bear it. Never have I lived in a place where the dark was the kind you had to feel your way through. The nearest store was 30 miles away, and coyotes often roamed the streets after dark in search of prey. I walked a quarter mile to get my mail.

Once a week, someone left boxes and baskets of delicious food: Danish pastries, blueberry bagels, organic hens and free-range sausage, and the most vibrant and plump vegetables I’d ever seen. No one knew who left these gifts, but every week felt like Christmas as everyone in town scrambled to see what had been left beneath our makeshift tree.

One day, I got so many Amazon packages and I had no car to cart everything home. Boxes dropped. Eggplants careened. And a man, who was about 60, pulled up in his truck and offered me a ride home. I froze and shook my head because kids of the ’80s knew never to get into a stranger’s car.

“You living in Beau’s old place, right? Listen, kid, I’m not going to kill you.”

And our laughter broke the silence, and he drove me home.

There’s not much to do in Pinyon, so I hiked, I ate, I built fires and watched old movies. Peter Sellers, Vincent Price, and Jean-Luc Godard.

There was much by the way of scenery. The snow-capped mountains, the violet evening sky, horned sheep and coyote packs, an air crisp and clean — it was the first time I’d fallen in love with California.

Amid the beauty, there were blackouts, an earthquake, and the kind of cold that reminded me of back East. There was also loneliness. I’ve always been allergic to people, large groups terrify me, but when you’re deprived of human contact, you begin to long for it. I talked to any human I could find. And I made friends with the man who lived across the road, a man shunned by many in town because he was openly gay. He also had HIV, but I don’t think anyone knew that, and he didn’t tell me until we had dinner one night.

He was in his fifties and his life had been brutal. He was now trying to climb his way back to himself. Living a quiet life with his sweet dog and chickens. Working in the local supermarket. Knowing him made me aware of my privilege and how much I took for granted. We had an entirely different vernacular. He wasn’t someone who drank $30 bottles of wine, but he helped me appreciate a $2 bottle.

Maybe it was our mutual loneliness or the sense that we were both trying to climb our way out of the mess we’d created, but we grew intensely close. And anyone who knows me knows this is a near impossibility because I’m impenetrable. Prickly, tough to know and love. But it was his kindness and the way he made me laugh that broke through. He was the first person I started knocking away at my walls for.

I remember a drive down the mountain, and he was telling me a story and it put me to thinking about my pop, my mother, the fact that I’m the last of my kind, and I started crying. I caught myself and sputtered apologies. Wiping my face down, I told him this wasn’t the sort of thing I did.

“What?” he said. “Be human? Have emotion?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

“It’s okay to cry, Felicia.”

And I didn’t say anything for a while until he offered to join in on the tear parade. We could fill the entire jeep with our collective sadness and somehow this made me laugh so hard. It felt good to feel something again.

One night, I cooked a meal for us. Making a meal is my way of saying the words I find difficult to speak out loud. We passed plates between us. Refilled glasses of wine. Showed off our battle scars. Over the course of a few hours, his phone lit up. It was his ex, a man he still loved, and probably always would. His face rearranged itself, and I flushed because I remembered that look. A look of love that altered.

We talked about our great loves, wars waged and battles defeated, and he reminded me that being stingy with one’s heart was no way to live.

I through about my fortress, and he told me to fuck the locks. Leave the door wide open. I laughed the laugh of small children. When he left, I remembered the way he looked when he saw his lover’s name, and I bit my lip because I wanted that look too. A man who’s home to me.

Up until this year, I hadn’t been living — I was only existing.

Look at the rows of Joshua trees, my friend pointed out as we drove into town. The yucca palms aren’t actual trees — they’re massive succulents with a spray of spindles jutting out from spindly arms. We were in the high desert, he reminded me, at an elevation of 3,000 feet, and the first thing I noticed as we climbed out of his car was the wind. The ferocity of it. How you have to bolt down your gates with cinder blocks lest they fly away Wizard of Oz style.

The main strip in town has a patina to it — it’s a mix of tourists and locals rummaging through racks at the local vintage shop. Sipping on wheatgrass from the popular nearby health shop. After being isolated in a cabin for two months, it was shocking to see people all around me. Saloons, roads, intersections, gift shops that sell miniature plastic Joshua trees. Park tours as far as the eye can see.

My house in Joshua Tree was surrounded by wood and corrugated metal. I was boxed in—safe. I lit fires and texted friends a walking tour of my temporary home come evening. I woke in the middle of the night to the windows shaking. The wind. It hadn’t quite hit me that I’d made the journey from the girl clutching a U2 album cover, a girl who could never imagine leaving New York, to a woman falling in love with a state on the other side of the country. A woman who woke at four in the morning to see the stars, to patiently wait until morning to make the trek to the Park. To make parts whole and complete.

In Joshua Tree, my heart was no longer prodigal. I befriended the woman who baked me a loaf of fresh sourdough every morning. I feasted on fat pancakes and the best towering burgers I’ve ever eaten. I shook my head at a place offering New York pizza, which tasted nothing like the pizza I grew up eating.

Stay there long enough and people will know your name.

Business was booming so much that I’d launched a three-day brand workshop and was booked out until the end of spring. In late February, I flew to New York for work and couldn’t wait to get back home. It was warm for February and I walked from Flatiron to Soho and marveled over how much had changed. I sipped wine and tea with friends, and although I’d walked these streets as a child, a teenager, a woman in her twenties and thirties, New York suddenly felt foreign to me.

My home had become a stranger, and it dawned on me that I’d started to refer to California as home.

It’s terrifying to realize home isn’t a physical place, it’s a sense of belonging.

At the airport, people wore masks, but I was unfazed because I often travel to Asia and people wear masks regularly there. On the plane ride home, I braced for turbulence, but for the first time it didn’t bother me, because this was finally, finally going to be the best year yet.

And then the fucking pandemic hit and my best-laid plans, the year I was finally getting and deserved, became threadbare. Unraveled. I watched the once-packed Park and streets thin out. The local candle and crystal shops were anemic. Store owners and local restaurants braced themselves and reduced hours and shuttered completely.

Every morning in the cold or the rain, I’d walk with nowhere to go because two shops and a convenience store were left, and they didn’t open until 10. The rain came down in sheets, but it felt good to have something touch my skin.

While people hoarded bleach and flour, I winnowed down. I’d been traveling with things I realized I didn’t need — I carted along a Vitamix for the first six months — so I sold and donated half of what I brought on the trip with me. While we think we own our things, in fact, they own us. We become tethered to our possessions and the fiction of the joy they breed. Why do we need wardrobes or one sweater in five colors? What is it with our obsessions with numbers, with math? Why must we always want more than we need or what’s possible?

I no longer wanted to bear the weight of the things I carried.

I’ve lived in 26 homes in 20 years and I keep moving—hoping I’ll find the right place, but nothing sits right, feels right. I get the fancy apartment with all the trimmings, the rustic cabin, the spacious home, but it’s all wrong, and part of me knows this but it’s more terrifying to realize home isn’t a physical place, it’s a sense of belonging.

I love no one. I’ve never belonged to anyone. This hurt is palpable, it aches in places I can and cannot see. I’m a spool of thread, forever unwinding. Forever reaching for that place of origin. Reaching out to someone who’s not there.

It’s easier to keep moving than to settle in this tremendous sadness. Oh, the places I wanted to go but could no longer go.

In Palm Springs, I receded. This home was fancier— a condo in a gated community where people of means golfed, played tennis, and lounged in their twilight years.

The lawns were verdant and pristine, and the pools were cool and shaped like kidneys. I witnessed a cactus bloom. The flowers were bone white and had no fragrance like the fuchsia and violet bougainvilleas in Los Angeles. It’s the absence of smell that haunted me, the expectation of a kind of beauty that never materialized.

In the three months I lived in Palm Springs, I left the property five times. The heat bore down on me, stripping what was left of my energy and hope. I was masked and spent most of my days cooking food and crying.

Why did this fucking pandemic have to happen this year? Why couldn’t I have just one good year? It’s a selfish want and I allowed myself to have it until I realized there were larger wants. A world that extended far beyond my reach.

Our suffering was made public for the world to see. And part of me took pleasure in the fact that I wasn’t the only one sad and alone.

An old friend and colleague from New York owns a home in Palm Springs, and I visited her one evening. I held her longer and tighter than I normally would, and I told her it was the first time I’d touched someone in months. We drank wine into the gloaming, and when she drove me home, I cried because I wasn’t sure when I’d see anyone I know again.

I never wanted Palm Springs, never craved it. It was a move of convenience and proximity. And the home came with a rent of $1,400, which I hadn’t paid since 2008. I loved a flexible rent, a way I could pick a new place that jibed with a budget that kept changing because the world kept changing. But I was happy to leave Palm Springs.

Ojai is hope. Ojai is horses in paddocks and goats in the grass. Vineyards in Lompoc and Santa Barbara. Walnut and pistachio pesto and local arugula. A small stretch of shops on Ojai Avenue sell honey, wine, books, and homemade tortillas. Ojai is sore limbs from hiking trails and the sides of mountains. I wore sweaters when it was 80 degrees because it felt like winter compared to the cruel heat of Palm Springs.

It’s here where I wanted nothing more to look and feel normal again, though I’m not sure what normal is anymore. I’d like to get a haircut. I’d like to color my grays because the box stuff isn’t cutting it. Here, I felt feral, exposed, and I looked around and wondered how people could look so assembled. Fresh off the factory floor, while I’m worse for wear. Ready for the trash heap.

I wanted to stop strangers and ask if someone was cutting their hair because I’m close to nabbing the kitchen shears and going at it on my own.

In Ojai, I created some of my best work of the year while the world fell asunder. I began feeling cracks in my fault, and while everyone told me to “Buck up, persevere, keep moving, keep fighting,” I want to cry out that I’ve been fighting from the womb. I’ve been moving since I was five. I’ve been taking care since I was 10. I’ve been bucking up until I could buck no more. Today, it occurred to me that I’ve never rested. I’ve been operating on five-alarm since inception, and I don’t know if I’ll know a time when I feel safe and secure.

I thought about Mexico and calling out to my mother. “I want my mother.” The words didn’t register even after I’d said them. It was only hours later, when I picked up a phone in a hotel room and wanted to call her, but I didn’t know her number or where she lived.

Childhoods are taken for granted. Someone tucked you in at night and you slept a soundless sleep. You never woke up wondering if you had to shove your clothes into trash bags and flee into the night. You never wondered if a strange man would stand over your bed. Watching you sleep. Sometimes, I hate you for not knowing this, but I can’t hate you because every child deserves to live in a kingdom before adults find a way to ruin it.

I am so very tired.

In Ojai, I wonder if I’d ever publish another book. If I’d find a new agent who doesn’t care if I get a six-figure advance. If I’ll keep working. If I have the desire to do more than get out of my bed and shower. If I’ll leave this country because I no longer love it, even though California feels like home.

Have I lived a dignified life? Did I do good? Was it worth it? The answers elude me. In geometry, they would be x, another unknown.

When I was small, I would tuck the blankets under my toes in fear of vampires, who were really junkies with clawed-raw skin and eight-ball eyes. They’d sneak into our rooms and rifle for change. Shake us for what we had.

Who could blame them? We take what we can get.

Come October, I return to where I began: Los Angeles. I don’t know how I feel about a sprawling city. The freeways we speak about as often as our beloveds. Ocean gloom and jasmine. The good sandwich place in Larchmont. Sidecar Donuts. People who have a license but don’t know how to drive.

This isn’t a surrender, it’s the in-betweens. I was supposed to have it all figured out this year — where I’d live, what I’d do, who I’d be. I turn 45, but I don’t feel my years, although my body would suggest otherwise.

This is a realization that home is where I feel safe. Home is quiet. Home is cool air, towering trees. Walking with nowhere to go. A charcoal night sky. A warm place in, out, around, beyond, above, below, and beneath my heart. A warmth that expands and swathes everyone in its reach. Home is the feeling that I did good. I lived a dignified life. I did what I could with what I had. Home is a nubby sweater and a glass of wine. The bolognese everyone loves so much. Home is rooting down, but letting go.

This year was a map of that country, and while I haven’t reached it just yet, I’m on my way.

This is the morning in 2019 when I left. An empty apartment behind me, all of 2020 ahead of me.