There used to be a restaurant in Westwood called Acapulco. I would go to Margarita Mondays after my Public Relations job and drink 2-for-1 margaritas. I would sit in a deep, thick sadness, fixating on that whatever boy was supposed to call me that hadn’t called. The food was so bad and the interior was so over-the-top with all its artesanía. The drinks were the size of my head. I went there alone. I went there with my boss. I went there with friends who were really just acquaintances. I could walk there from my apartment and stumble home somehow safely. The stench of onions and grease stayed in my hair for days, stuck to my clothes even through a cycle of laundry. It was a place of discomfort because it never brought about anything good. But it was also a place of comfort because I always knew what to expect. The restaurant fulfilled all of its promises. The only promises that were broken were the ones that I’d made to myself.
Now, it’s a Tender Greens.
I truly thought that walking through the ridiculous archway of Alcapulco would heal me. Every time I crossed its threshold, I wished for something. It was always packed, but it carried a loneliness. It said, You can feel like shit here. We can feel like shit together.
I once sat across from my boss who had brought one of her friends, some aspiring model, and I listened as they talked about their respective boob jobs. I kept checking my phone to see if whoever the fuck was going to text or call. I remember even going outside at one point to make the call myself, only to receive no answer and of course I wasn’t going to leave a message. I remember thinking that my boss at the model had it all. They weren’t worried about men, but had somehow figured out how to focus the gaze inward, onto themselves. What did they want? What were their dreams, their goals, their ambitions?
And today, I sit in one of the remodeled booths and eat a steak salad. I’ve always loved a Tender Greens for its consistency, for knowing that my meal will be healthy and reasonably priced. But I can’t help but mourn the loss of Alcapulco.
I moved from California back home to Florida in the early spring of 2012. Apparently, according to the Internet, Alcapulco closed its doors just a few weeks after my departure. I’d moved to California in the summer of 2011. I remember my roommate at the time, a girl who was never even home because her older boyfriend worked in finance and she was almost always with him at his place, when she told me “You didn’t even make it a whole year.”
I look out the window of Tender Greens onto Glendon Avenue. I’ve walked up and down this street so many times, so many years ago. I used to frequent O’Hara’s on Tuesdays for $1 beers served in a glass boot with my one and only friend, Jennifer. The bar is now called Rocco’s Tavern. I used to get my nails done at InStyle Nails every Saturday. I was especially glad that they carried the entire Katy Perry collection. Sadly, they are now a Uni KWax Center. Even the two famous theaters, the Westwood Village Theater and The Bruin, both closed down this past summer. Thankfully, Enzo’s is still there, except they’ve recently changed locations for some reason, moving just down the street and around the corner.
It’s been over ten years since I lived in Westwood, so I know that I should have expected so much of Westwood Village to change, to update and get with the times. I'm not the same person I was when I used to live there, so why would the city remain the same? I'm not 22 working PR and writing a blog (I have a Substack now instead!) and I'm not chasing after idiot guys who will never grow up. I am married and have a family and I'm a professor and a published author. How much of me is me? I promise I'm not high. What I mean to ask is, how much of myself do I carry with me through time?
Westwood has a feeling. It is romantic and a little broken and it has that campus-edge vibe and it’s cool and it’s casual and it oddly shaped and it’s one big hill, upward or downward depending which way you’re coming from, which way you’re going, and it’s got lore, it’s got style. It feels like being 22 in a city that’s not your own. It feels like late nights and bad choices and studio apartments and parking garages and all those California sycamores and coast live oaks.
When it’s time to go to work, I thank the cooks for my meal and head out the entryway. Underneath the archway again, I wonder if it’s foolish to make a wish. I decide it probably is, but still, I stand at the threshold and close my eyes anyway.
*
During a bodywork session, my massage therapist tells me that something is stuck in my rib. The rib cage, so, what is it I might put in a cage? An idea? A feeling? Another person? Myself? She massages the place where it hurts until the pain disperses with grace.
Before we started, she’d explained how the session would work, how she would press on different parts of me and find things that were tender, that were stuck, that were closed. And then, she would open them. She explained how memory can become lodged in the fascia of the body, how the tissue acts as a sort of web.
Fascia is the thin casing of connective tissue that surrounds and holds every organ, blood vessel, bone, nerve fiber, and muscle in place. Fascia provides structural support for the entire body. It separates muscles and encloses organs. It contains nerves that make it almost as sensitive as our skin. It’s flexible and moves with us, with our bodies. And when we experience trauma, fascia can tighten and become rigid, which leads to pain and loss of motion. Fascia are like sheets of tissue, continuous and overlapping, different layers that have different properties. A web. Yes, it makes sense.
Our fascia remembers things that maybe our minds do not. Like how the back of my right leg stores a memory of my grandma, how she wanted me to be someone important, someone worth something, how she expected so much from me. Or behind my shoulder blade and a lie I’ve been telling myself since I was twenty-two. And then the rib, that perhaps I am supposed to be a certain way, a version of myself I thought I needed, she is in that cage and I would love to let her out.
I leave the bodywork session and go to Target. But I become angry halfway through purchasing items off my list. The feelings, the emotions—the fascia has been plucked and irritated and now my body can no longer keep them. I am all out of sorts.
It feels like I’ve opened Pandora’s Box. Everything has run amuck. The moral of that myth is something about the consequences of tampering with the unknown. And also, that even in the face of trials, people can maintain their hope. Hope remains.
*
One year ago, I was celebrating my MRI results as benign, washing my hands of this scare and putting it to rest. And now, I find myself again at another threshold.
Routine blood work turned into a need for further testing turned into a need for another MRI turned into inconclusive results.
In the yoga studio parking lot, I Google what the numbers mean, what the enzymes are responsible for, what the levels of the blood work means. Everything I find is bad news. I go into the class anyway and try to tell myself that I’ll know more soon. There’s nothing I can do right at this moment.
But I leave class early. I can’t focus. My body knows this feeling of unease, the inability to fix a problem right away and the need to wait it out. I don’t sleep well at night. I dream in spirals, versions of my life that don’t include me in it. In the dreams, I know my husband and my daughter, but they don’t know me. Or, they are going somewhere that I cannot follow. Or, they are behind a glass partition and they can’t see me or hear me. I am a ghost of myself, in the dreams and in real life.
This wait-it-out period is too familiar. Because this is how things always are—you don't know until you know. And it’s always painful not to have an answer. My shoulders tense up toward my ears. There’s a new knot in my neck at the base of my skull. I try to tamp it down with ice packs and hot tea and a foam roller. I order a prickly pink massage therapy ball from the Internet that is supposed to help relieve tension.
Two weeks later, I'm sent back to the lab for more blood work. They pick the same vein as last time, also the same spot as my MRI contrast fluid IV. The crook of my left arm is sore, a black hole, a deep well. It will remember this.
After I gave birth, it took four days for my back to start itching in one particular spot. I was still in a half-there state of being, still floating between labor and delivery and real life, when I pulled my postpartum dress over my head and said I couldn’t take it anymore. The baby nurse was there as I had Carl examine my back.
“What is it!?” I asked.
“There’s some tape here from your epidural,” he said and he and the baby nurse peeled it off my body.
“This is good,” she told me, her nails working into my skin to lift up the tape. “You’re getting your bodily autonomy back.”
Two days after my laparoscopy surgery back in June, I had extreme pain all over my body, especially in my neck and back.
“It’s trapped gas,” Carl told me as he rubbed my shoulders. “The surgeon explained this might happen. It’s the carbon dioxide from the abdomen that’s irritating the nerves. She said it can be so bad, it brings some people back to the hospital.
My body was remembering what it went through while my mind played catch-up.
*
I had promised myself that I would return to California and not feel the desperate urge to try to reconnect with anyone who had previously made me feel like shit. I don’t have room for that in my life anymore, and I don’t wish to show my daughter that you need to social climb or socially cling to anyone in order to make friends. I have enough friends, as far as I'm concerned.
But I have found myself back in that old web, that wanting to be accepted by people who for some reason do not accept me. They don’t want me, and I honestly don’t even want them. It’s the feeling of what is wrong with me? that makes it difficult, this feeling that they are seeing something I don’t, as if they know me better than I do.
I want to re-write a story that is more supportive than there is something wrong with me.
I can’t take all the credit for this notion. My therapist (yes, a new one!) recommended it. She said, “You’re a writer, why don’t you re-write a story that is more supportive here?”
I usually balk at any sort of advice that involves positive affirmations or any self-gratifying aspect, but the idea of re-writing my thoughts, of being able to do what I do with my fiction but with my real life, is appealing to me.
In my work, I get to re-write the past and transform it into something new, into art. So why not make my life into art? Ugh, I know, it’s really cringe, but I think it works! There are all these TikToks about romanticizing your breakfast routine, making our lives more interesting than they really are, but what about just taking my present being and fashioning a more helpful and kind narrative than the one I currently tell? It doesn’t have to be cheesy; it can be optimistic.
Something about being in the throes of this medical mystery has felt the same as being shafted by certain people in my life. It has me wondering what’s wrong with me? Really, what is it? What is it that I need to change? What can I do to heal? What can I do to make everyone like me? Am I going to be okay? Is it hopeless, or should I hold onto hope?
The more supportive story is that I am going to deal with this, no matter what it is. The truth is that I don’t need everyone to like me, and the people who do reciprocate my friendship are the golden angels of my life.
I burn my forearm making salmon in a hot pan. It’s only a first-degree burn, minor, but the part where skin touched pan still turns dark, a two inch curve that when I turn my arm to check it out, looks like a little smile.
*
I Zoom with my doctor to review all the findings. It turns out that my body has rewritten a more supportive story. The liver lesions are shrinking since last year. And my new blood work was all back to normal. I could have had a bug or a virus when I last got the labs done. It could have been stress. It could have been a fluke. I still need annual MRIs to make sure the lesions continue to diminish. I will still probably worry each time as I wait for the results. I will still be sad when someone doesn’t like me, or when I think they don’t like me. But I will tell myself it doesn’t matter because it really doesn’t when so many other people love me so deeply and so real.
I go to dinner with my friends and we talk about so many different things—books and movies and the holidays and our lives and our travels. Of course we talk about the things that are ailing us, but each one of us gives support to the other in turn. We write a new tale for each other, the ways we will help each other through, the ways we will show up.
My daughter makes a friend at the park. Every day she is a light that shines. She gives me hope.
*
In a dream, I see my uncle who recently passed. I'm riding in an elevator and it goes awry, the numbers of the floors scrambling like a slot machine. The doors open and he stands there, his eyes find mine. He says, Where have you been? and the doors shut. The elevator starts up and continues its ride. The doors open again to the right floor. I exit and somehow I know where to go.
I think about it, where have I been? I have been so consumed with matters of my body the last few years. I still have flashbacks of the Labor and Delivery unit. I still have memories that haunt me from the day I needed lifesaving surgery. The medical bills I don’t feel like I should have to pay disturb me. I keep getting them in the mail. I take pictures of the bills and make them into PDFs. I attach them to an email and send it to the doctor back in Tennessee. After she found out I almost died, she messaged me and said to let her know if I had any questions. I respond with my bills. I find myself in a new place, new memories ahead to behold, new things to see and do.
New life to live.
—
Honored to have a reworked and revised version of one of my previous Substacks, “Returning to the Middle,” recently published in Allium Journal.
The first Carpool for Write or Die went off without a hitch, and I am excited to announce our Winter meeting for Monday, January 13th at 12pm PST!! Come start your year off right with all of us tired parents :) Sign up HERE!
More fun things to come in the New Year— TWO long form classes for Lighthouse Writers:
Experimental Essays will run on Tuesdays in January (1/7-1/28 at 3-5pm PST)
Writing the Nonhuman will on Tuesdays in February (2/4-2/25 at 3-5pm PST)
re-writing a more supportive story sounds so lovely. let's be co-authors <3