A long time ago, I was in love with a man. Really in love, and that man became my first husband. There was a time when I was returning to this man, this love, on a plane, and on the way home I kept pressing my shoes into the floor to drive the plane home faster. Out the window, there was a view of that ethereal New Mexican snow. But I could not see anything except what was waiting for me at the end of the runway.

That was quite a few years ago, and that love is gone. But I’ll never forget driving my heels into that airplane floor. Driving myself into the future. How is it that I forget so much, but remember a pair of thrashed leather boots and a frayed carpet? The smell of cheap wine and air freshener? The feeling of that pull, that agony of waiting to see if what you fell in love with is still there?

This is not about my old love and my failed marriage. This is about my home. Today I drove home from Santa Barbara pushing the floorboards of my car, to get home, after two and a half weeks away. What is it about this place that replaces the need for human love?

It’s an interesting thought, though not a new one. Places rather than people dominate an awful lot of literature. I feel I may bore people not familiar with Ocean Beach by going on about the way the sea air smells, or the way the palm trees blot out the ocean fog if you make a loose fist over your line of vision. I figure people won’t understand when I tell them how I can be hurtling slowly through space, and how that disorients and ungrounds me, but when I get back to OB the sound of a skateboard or even the sight of Sky the bartender at the Vine calms me and brings me back into the real world. The world outside, the world where I have to be “on,” the world where it is dangerous to not be alert, driving eighty miles an hour in a land of constant danger, vanishes fairly quickly here.

So. In my world, the one I have chosen to inhabit, the sun goes down and the sky is gray and pink. Palm trees sway against a hill full of expensive houses. I live down below, in a small bungalow I can’t ever imagine leaving for good. This place chose ME.

I am so lucky, to come home to this, and to feel the way I do. And that is my message after a long trip. Is this intense love permanent? Probably not. But while it is here, I am going to embrace it. I love you, Ocean Beach.