Just about three years ago, I was watching the sunset in St. Petersburg, Florida from a beachfront hotel window, halfway through a mediocre bottle of wine.
It was the day before my first interview for The Penny Hoarder. I had five weeks left before I was supposed to be back in Ohio to finish my MA, and was crying every night just thinking about it. The program was only two years long, though, and I’d already gotten through half of it; it was tuition-waived, stipended, and prestigious. I felt like an idiot giving the opportunity up, but everything in my body was telling me not to be there.
The day my final grades were in, I got in my car, hit the road, and didn’t stop — for long, anyway — for 11,000 miles. I cruised all the way west on I-10 and all the way north on the Pacific Coast Highway, waiting to find some place to stash myself, something to fall in love with, some version of my life that didn’t involve grad school.
I found a lot of wonderful, but nothing felt definitive. So I wound my way back east through Yellowstone and Denver, depositing myself right back where I’d started. With the new semester creeping closer every day, I decided I’d let myself drop out if I could find a worthy reason, a move I could justify as a legitimate career shift. I penned a cover letter to an unlikely southwest Florida startup — a personal finance blog — talking about how I wanted my words to do things in the world, to make actual changes in peoples’ lives, as opposed to floating around in literary journals that are read mainly by others trying to submit to them.
I hit “send” on my application before heading out to the gym that morning, smirking at my hubris. A waste of time. I had nary a clip to show, so I’d attached a personal essay, a few poems and — seriously — some wine-tasting notes. The essay definitely involved sex, and I think it was fairly graphic. I was grasping at straws.
But two days later, I found an unfamiliar email in my inbox. I’d been invited down for an interview.
That evening in the hotel room, I looked out over the buildings below, the golden-pink sky casting their shadows long and rectangular. People strolled along the beach or were swallowed into the glass doors of storefronts, walking out with bags of ice or cases of beer or new bathing suits. I ate a room service steak and finished the whole bottle of cab, imagining myself among them, imagining the new life coming for me, willing it into existence. I was totally unsure I was making the right move, or if I’d even get the opportunity to make it, but I was ready.
It’s a rather unfortunate set of personality traits to carry, to be both a homebody and an adventurer. Although I constantly crave novelty, I’m also a serious-business introvert, the kind of person for whom a couple of hours of socializing or a phone call is an exhausting, calendar-marked event. Increasingly with age, I find I need more of the trappings of stability to keep my anxiety at bay: four unshared walls and a door I know nobody will knock on. The daily opportunity to put my body under a barbell for an hour.
Most of my writing during this road trip — and even for a while before, while I was camped out in Saint Augustine — has been about this feeling of being unmoored, of being in between things. Despite my itchy feet, I’ve long wanted to adopt a place for my own for no other reason than my sheer desire to be there, to stay somewhere long enough to get on a first-name basis with its highways.
To get to my front door in Santa Fe, you have to walk down a pathway studded with crushed plums. My landlord, Jim, tells me the ones from the tree on the right are mysteriously sweeter, but I’m more inclined toward the apricots in the front yard anyway, or the crabapples just blooming in the back.
As soon as I sat down to sign the lease on July 5th, the sky opened up and unleashed the first real rainstorm Santa Fe has seen since well before I got here. A good omen, Jim said, before declaring he was going home to sit on his porch with a vodka and watch it.
I’d seen the lightning over the mountains as I was driving toward town for the signing, my stomach churning and flipping like it had been for the whole week since my first walkthrough. I’d stood in the kitchen, asking myself: will I call this place home? Is this the right place? Again, no voice from heaven boomed down a definitive answer.
On the fourth of July, I sat in the back of a new friend’s Jeep watching the fireworks, wondering if I’d follow through. I’d called my mother that afternoon and asked her what to do, crying and crying and crying. What if my clients dried up and I couldn’t make rent? How was I going to afford a housefull of furniture? What if I was wrong, and should have stayed in Colorado or Montana or Asheville?
What if they needed me?
You can’t make your decisions based on other people, my mother said. Besides, they have airplanes these days.
What, she asked, if something happens to you?
Independence Day. The significance didn’t escape me.
And so. I don’t know if I made the right choice. And I can’t say this is the “best” place. There is no flashing neon sign pointing to a spot on a map. There’s only what you choose and what you make of it.
But I do know this is a place I love, a place whose weirdnesses suit and intrigue me, a place that’s teeming with enough adventure to keep me busy for a while. And I do know that as soon as I signed the lease, the thing in my stomach unclenched; even as I handed over the hefty deposit, relief flooded me from nose to fingertips.
All of which is to say: I’ll be down here in the desert for a while. Come visit. I can’t promise I’ll have a couch anytime soon, but I do somehow have a ridiculous, fruit-bearing backyard even though I’m only a ten-minute walk from the plaza.
And if you have any excellent tips for finding used furniture, please share. Luckily, this is Santa Fe, and the thrift stores are flooded with the detritus of rich, white vacation-home owners — but I’m still open to suggestions.
