It’s still darkish at 6:36 and I can see a layer of thick fog over the mountain tops . It’s gorgeous to be up here when it is like this. It’s chillier up here which is challenging in the winter and in the summer, delicious.  I am now sipping on my ginseng mint tea and just the luxury of having a hot stream of tea rolling over my tongue and down my throat into my whatever that is that takes mouthfuls into the tummy, not the esophagus, yes, that’s it i think, and it gets warm with the brew and oh, the word brew helps me remember that I’ve gotten a taste for a kombucha today, it’s been a couple weeks this time. At the end of last week I realized I hadn’t had one that week. It was a triumph. And once I get what is causing me such an energy challenge in my chest and torso I will  be able to drink two or even three a week but I won’t because it bubbles my stomach too much. But maybe that’s just that actor guy that night in Joshua Tree.

I remember him kissing me on the mouth and what a great kisser he was. Leaning into my car and turning his head once he was inside the cab of the mustang and putting his lips to mine. It was a strong connection. Really beautiful. And yet, I had watched him onstage and knew he was fully centered on getting what he wanted out of life without the awareness that others were probably not feeling it as much as him that he should be the only point of focus. He was in a film and he was the actor on the panel with the director and producer maybe. And he was also known for working with a very well known director recently so he felt like he was the draw in the room I think. I didn’t know what sort of Q&A I was attending until I got there that night because I went because I went to the owner of the venue’s events a lot and I had broken up with my boyfriend and it was my chance to start going out by myself and I did and I had on a great off white muslin halter top that hit my full jeans right at the belly button and i had on my brown boots that make me look 5’9 and I was feeling great. I was also aware how much the ex boyfriend was trying to control my night. He’d brought along the friend who he talked about our relationship with even though we’d made an agreement that he didn’t do that. But he chose to and I think that had a lot to do with why our connection lost all its power. It was no longer between two but was a triad. And while triangles are the strongest shape for groundedness, the grounding it gave me was to realize I didn’t want to be with this man any longer. And then came the hot good kisser. It was amazing. And he hopped into my car and I didn’t kiss him up in the high desert. We were standing there face to face, body to body, hips about five inches apart, mouth about one inch from lips meeting and then it was obvious to me I couldn’t kiss him anymore. 

So I let that chasm be there, a coyote howled somewhere along the waves of our cold Mojave sand and he was gentleman enough and had enough self respect to just wait and see and when it didn’t happen was torn from his assumptions and stumbled around like a bouncing ball in a Sam Shepard play, trying to find a place to settle on the earth, a resting place.

And when he did find his North, we began a lyrical conversation under the faint light of a crescent moon and his words were silvery strands flowing from the past to the future with no way to land in between and before the sun came up, when it was a hint at the rim of the range of mountains behind me to the west we folded our long psychologically if not libidinally spent bodies into my Mustang and we took the cacti route back down the hill to the music man’s place. It was silent, stars were fading and he asked if I had a place and I told him I had a communal spot and he said he didn’t know what I meant. And I didn’t explain about the friend’s bed I was sleeping in. He wouldn’t have believed me. While my ex/ex/ex lover slept on the couch I was in his bed that still smelled like another woman’s fluids even though I’d put on fresh sheets. I think it is the best scent a man’s bed can have even when he’s between women like ex/ex/ex. 

A few years later I was living in Brazil with the sands of the Atlantic at the end of my street. Different waves but the same circuitous winds blew over the deep blue water to make them rise and I caught a whiff of the man, my one night Coyote Man. I was doing some deep healing work after leaving a man in Argentina, just barely separated, freshly ex’d, the month before.

The pain in my heart was like hot lightning coming down from the sky to my body. I couldn’t breathe. I woke up at night with my heart hitting my ribs calling out to be uncaged. And there was the man from the Mojave in between the rhythm of it, invisible but taking up room.

How does that happen I wonder? How does someone take up residence in the body of another without the host body knowing? I got over asking why and got to the digging, the excavation and shoveled him out. Perhaps people’s energy lives on after somewhere in our energy field once we’ve known them no matter how brief. Metaphysicians say sexual ties have to be consciously exorcized which is a tough road to hoe. But the alternative is to be tethered to an ex, an ex/ex or an ex/ex/ex forever. Like stacking pancakes one on top of the other, after a while there’s no amount of syrup that will make it easy to digest all those layers. How do you know you’ve done the cleansing magic effectively? A potential new “right partner” appears.

Conversely, the next day Coyote Man went back to L. A. to his acting career, another movie script awaited him. I never saw the award winning film he was in but the ex/ex-boyfriend had seen him that night at the music venue lean in my car. After we broke up and I left for Europe he saw the movie, sat there in the little makeshift cinema where we ate hot popcorn together. I didn’t ask how his viewing went. And the ex/ex-boyfriend didn’t volunteer a critique of Coyote Man’s performance and of course whether you are man or woman you’ve probably figured out he didn’t talk about how it made him feel to see his replacement on screen.

The ex-boyfriend did tell me all those bottles of kombucha I had sitting around in the kitchen we’d shared were so ripe with fermentation they were bursting open. I asked if he tried any and he said no but I barely heard his answer. I was picturing what it must have been like to be sitting in the movie cubby watching your long lost girlfriend’s latest liaison burst onto the screen.

In my 20s I was an actor full time so by proximity I have known male performers who ended up disrupting my future by suddenly appearing in a flick my 30-something self was watching while my son slept in the next room. The juxtaposition of motherhood amidst the hyper real ex-lover persona coming on the screen without warning hit me like a doctor’s tuning fork on a bent knee. All those memories would rush in.

Looking back I could have save myself some psychological incongruency if I’d read the fine print on the rental case before watching. It’s odd to be engrossed in a story and then your past is embodied right there ten feet tall. The way he sips hot coffee always burning the tender skin of his red top lip, the way his fingernails feel along your sweaty spine, the way the bathroom smells after he’s had a shower; they all flood into your experience of the movie ruining it or accentuating it depending on how the two of you managed to close the door between what you wanted once but don’t any more.

Or it’s easy because you nudge your memory around the corner of the hallway on the first morning when he relaxed the new lover tension around dating etiquette and relieved his bowels in your toilet bowl. You tie yourself down so you can’t run from the recall of the ungodly scent that permeated your small Hollywood apartment. It came from that towering figure up there I tell myself too sharply. 

And if that isn’t cooling your jets you remember the way he was always, always stoned, sometimes a little glassy eyed, sometimes medicated to the point of slobbery when you needed to talk so it was no use. Or how bitchy you felt and eventually could not refrain from expressing your lack of enthusiasm when he skipped past the concept of reciprocal physical intimacy. That part was the worst, to reach the casual stage without anything mind blowing to fill up the emptiness because you were an in demand ingenue, damn it, and people wrote you creepy letters that your agent hesitantly passed on to you because these people, these strange men wanted to be in your life and well, bring you the pleasure you were very sure you deserved.

So his lips took on a liverish quality, and his tongue reminded you of those cows from your father’s pasture, their bulging eyes looking down at you as they chewed, and spewed their cud. It left you feeling sort of like you wanted to stick your finger in your throat and get him out of your body, out of your life; simple like that.

So, yea, I did stand there in front of you that night surrounded by magma boulders and starlight, gorgeous, and metaphorically I guess I did knee you in the balls. I did but does it matter if you still managed to inch your way into my heart.

When I first arrived in Berlin about three months after I drove Coyote Man back to his Prius I hopped around from hostel to hostel and one night when I was finally over the jet lag and sleeping Germany hours I was awakened to a chilling scream from the bottom bunk one bed over. I rose up on my elbows startled. I could hear bare feet slapping across the painted concrete floor below my bunk and then a bright bulb positioned between the next bunk and mine revealed two girls barely out of their teens hunched over the bottom one’s covers. Then they lit their iPhone flashlight and focused the beam on the white bed sheet of the bottom bunk.

They both began to scream but I couldn’t see what was there except wads of bedding. The intensity of the sounds they made in the cold would ease like a wave sliding onto the sea shore and then apparently the light would reveal something even more horrific and another wave of shrillness would vibrate around my sleepy head. I was curious but couldn’t use words to get more information from them because they were speaking a choppy language I couldn’t come close to deciphering. I knew it wasn’t German.

The only thing I knew for certain was that something bad and minuscule entranced them and revolted them simultaneously. The standing one began to back away from the object on the sheet and the one whose bed it was peddled backward like a crab hitting her head on the leg of the bunk connecting the bottom to the top.

Fortunately I had worn a t-shirt that night to bed, even if the room apparently wasn’t safe it was refrigerated, probably because they were inadvertently providing a haven what turned out to be a rare kind of worm. It was not quite a bedbug, I knew that and the hostel owner later confirmed it came from a backpacker from a hot country. It was more like a tiny slug but with the ability to turn its head, do slugs have faces, toward the camera and reach up wiggling side to side and up toward the flashlight. Maybe it was drawn to the warmth of the girl’s skinny legs. Even without my reading glasses, who had time to dig around an overstuffed backpack for them, I could make out something shiny with two black dots at its tip as the girls motioned me to come closer…and closer. I gave a nod, tried to behave demurely and nod as I smiled weakly at both their faces miming for them to breath into their bellies.

The shrieks shrank a decibal or two and as I got closer to the problem. It occurred to me as I leaned under the top bunk and peered at the spot they were illuminating that the creature’s demarcations passed for facial features because we homosapiens anthropomorphize anything that frightens us.

Filmmakers like M. Knight Shyamalan regurgitate our dark primal propensity to believe we are the center of the universe right back to us and we release what can never be undone: darkness in all its sublimity. We eat butter slathered popcorn while we watch humans tower above us on a shiny piece of fabric while light and dark interact with the natural and the supernatural realms of the unknowable; we bypass reality and the too perfumed movie goer next to us so that our senses can be reeled into a surface similar to the walls of Plato’s proverbial cave. Brain chemicals shackle us to a suspended belief that we’re in another world, one that will end fairly predictably.

Just so, that Berlin hostel tableau eventually catapulted me into an apartment with no furniture. It wasn’t a linear fear I was escaping. Even though my Kreutzberg bunk that night was bug free, I still jammed my two sets of traveller duds into my Lululemon backpack and up and left before dawn. Meanwhile the girls trotting out at least ten minutes ahead of me. After that experience with micro-sloths I upgraded to Airbnbs for a couple weeks but the uneasiness of the unseeable stayed with me and every couple nights I would swear as I threw back the covers of whatever new place I was renting and that my skin crawled for a very real reason. I was wrong.

By the time Fall rolled around I had rented my own private apartment in the artist district of Neukolln. I went all out and bought a new bed from the Spandau Ikea along with my own goose down comforter and crisp, never used sheets. I set them up on my otherwise bare hardwood floors and slept like a baby except on Sundays when a nearby church battered its tower bells with great ferocity.

Similarly, after my desert travails with the ex/ex I forced myself to move on like my ancestral genes demanded. Go West they echoed.

Like all places on earth the Mojave has its own legacy and those million year old molten protrusions from the tectonic plates whispered it was time to head for the ocean so I headed down the hill.

Now, living on the Pacific side of Hollywood another actor has come into my life. Was he a sign the alchemy worked? Why didn’t you learn you didn’t match well with actors, you might add, but you, if you look a little deeper inside, may find like I did over the decades, that some aspects of desire remain until they have spent themselves all over your puffy no-longer-an-ingenue Kombucha belly.