It’s probably 1995 and we’re in the blonde twins’ upstairs bedroom, a threadbare Lakers T-shirt draped over the lampshade to set the mood.
There’s the library down the street where I read 100 books one summer, and the convenience store next to it where I’d steal candy and Bazooka gum and never get caught. The sushi restaurant in the catty-cornered strip mall behind the Taco Bell, where I learned from the laminated placemat menu that the Japanese word for ‘you’re welcome’ sounds a lot like ‘don’t touch my mustache.’
That always made me giggle.
Look, I’m 9 years old and my BFF Lauren’s mom probably drove us in their faux wood-paneled station wagon past the old Stagecoach Inn where we didn’t stop to pan for iron pyrite this time because we were probably late to Christina and Jennifer’s for the real Kraft Mac n’ Cheese dinner (the one my mom would never let us have at home cuz preservatives) and, of course, our weekly sleepover.
We’re neck deep in cheerleading season, and we’ve been practicing for the homecoming game at Newbury Park High School – that one day a year when they let us cheer next to the older girls we idolize on the spongy black lap track between the football field and the metal bleachers, the entire world watching.
We weren’t about to fuck this up.
“Steelers, don’t take no ugh, jive!” Side-step to hip thrust clap-hop. “Steelers, I said, we are alive!” Side hip with jazz hands flare-out.
Yes, my body still knows the moves three decades after my fingers would ever clutch a black-and-gold tissue paper pom-pom again.
We should be rehearsing our four-person pyramid but fuck it, it’s the weekend; all bets are off and somebody busts out the Ouija Board from the closet, so it’s on.
We say a prayer to invoke our séance like the girls from The Craft and Christina takes a breath into the beyond before asking the most important question of our lives:
“Who’s gonna be my first kiss?”
Nerves are high as we hold shaky fingertips over the plastic edges of that haunted device, slowly tracing the letters that would determine our foreseeable futures, and those of so many suburban girls like us the world ‘round. Our fate hangs before us worse than those pink polka dot curtains tied daintily across bent-and-dusty blinds, copper streetlight gazing in for effect.
“Ohmygod I knew it was gonna be Mike!” Christina celebrates. “He sat next to me at lunch yesterday!”
“No way, he’s my crush!” Her twin interjects.
“Chicks before dicks, remember?!” Lauren reminds us, always the voice of reason.
We’re holding our stomachs now, sideways in laughter on the scratchy carpet.
“It’s bedtime, girls!” Christina and Jennifer’s mom, our cheer coach, hollers up from the TV room so as not to miss the highlights from the OJ Simpson trial.
It’s my turn at the Ouija board and since I’m a little Scorpionic weirdo I speak into the void the only question that comes to mind:
“How old will I be when I die?”
Not sure anyone’s really ready for that one, including me, but we roll with it.
Destiny takes over and our fingers move magically across woodtype numbers in a line.
7.
Our eyes widen in unison, collective curiosity. It’s working.
Ouija doesn’t hesitate, and we’re moving again.
2.
That’s enough for me, but she’s not done with us yet. The oversized guitar pick-shaped oracle points diagonally down, towards me, and makes a bee-line for the bottom of the board.
GOOD BYE.
Ouija was good. Very good. Unequivocal in her message. Not a stutter to her name.
72. GOOD BYE.
“Can we just play something normal like Clue again, please?” I decide on behalf of the squad that it’s time for Ouija and her board to go back in their stupid little box in the closet.
Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the study… anyone?
It’s August 2025.
I’m out of storage, both digitally and figuratively, so I clear up some space by trading in the busted Jimny for a lifted Tacoma, quitting all my jobs, annulling my fake marriage, and finally figuring out how to forget about my favorite fuck boy.
Saturn in Aries is giving main character energy, and my mid-life crisis is here for it.
If 72 is my end game like the Ouija board predicted, I’m already past halfway to my expiration date.
There is no more time to waste.
And luckily, a mermaid is never early nor late.
It’s Friday night at our favorite watering hole in the jungle, and I’m in my gold-sequined miniskirt and black crop-top sitting on the lap of a 24-year-old surfer babe, more little bro than love interest. He and the boys are sipping long-necked Pilsens, joking about something or other.
I’ve been mostly sober for the better part of the past decade, so I contemplate a trip to the bar for my signature club soda with lime and salt.
In two months, I’ll be 40.
I scan the scene around me. The usual suspects perched on bar stools, having the same conversation they’ve had every Friday for a quarter century. The tourist families in hibiscus-flowered button downs and bright-colored sun dresses, shvitzing in the humid heat of the season. Kids barefoot and scraggly-haired at the ping-pong table. Local vendors peddling handcrafts and natural skincare, homemade ice cream and artisanal chocolate. Yoga retreat girls sunburnt from their surf lessons. Birdwatcher grandpas getting sauced, eyeing the dance floor. Some of the surfer boys still standing arms-crossed beside their motorbikes in the parking lot, unimpressed.
Community is an interesting concept to consider in the jungle, where most of us have convened in shared love of the waves, the quiet of paradise as yet mostly unexploited. With fewer than fifty full-time residents in a 15-mile radius, we’re a lot of big fish in this little pond.
Yet here we are, week after week, for as long as we can remember. We’ve been here for fist fights in the front yard and 10:00pm drug raids, strangers doing bumps in the bathroom and fucking in rental cars parked on the dirt road outside.
Coming of age. Coming undone. Dancing ourselves back together.
Beneath the strobe lights and slow-spinning disco ball, this is where the animal in all of us comes to return. We’re here to see and not be seen.
The doctor from town, strawberry-blonde and fit, strolls over in her cute jean shorts and cowboy boots for a chat, slurring a little to tell us she’s celebrating her 40th.
“I think you girls need to stop talking so much about being 40,” surfer bro blurts out from beneath me as I offer her a high-five in the solidarity of 1985.
“40’s the fucking best!” she replies with a friendly finger point in his direction, heel-turning her boots in the dirt en route to the dance floor.
I get up, slide on my candy-red heart-shaped sunglasses, and follow, hoping I’ll feel the same when my day comes along.
If we’re still here dancing at 40, I’d say we’re doing pretty okay.
Today’s my birthday.
Ten years ago, I confronted the start of a new decade with a story and a question: I wonder if thirty-me will make a life forty-me will be proud of?
As I turn the page on 40 now, life in retrospect feels full in a way I couldn’t have anticipated then.
The rise and fall of a soulmate, living our dreams in my favorite surf town, in a van along Central American coastlines and northern Californian mountains, on boats among islands in the Indian Ocean.
Becoming a dog mom to my sweet and ferocious, now six-year-old Rottweiler, and thrice an auntie to my sister’s gaggle of kiddos growing up too fast.
Finishing my PhD and establishing some semblance of a niche career as an educator and critical surf studies scholar. Surfing on six continents and now at home as often as humanly possible. Hosting writing workshops and retreats for women. Moving further south to grow roots in a place I have always dreamed of calling home.
Reading it back, it does feel like a life to be proud of. At least by my own standards.
But alas, my once-a-year therapist says it’s time for me to grow up.
Problem is, I don’t exactly know how. Been chasing freedom so long, I wonder if growing up is even in the cards anymore.
Certain things have changed, of course. Like bigger bills and heavier responsibilities. The desire to create a sense of home in one place rather than following waves to faraway coastlines on any given day.
My yoga practice has become less contortionist acrobatics and more listening to what my body has to say. Surfing not for the racing-heart adrenaline or pushing my limits to the extreme, but rather in the spirit of deepening my connection with the ocean, experiencing a sense of belonging in place, focused on style and flow.
Deeper wrinkles I haven’t yet botoxed into oblivion because I want to believe that natural aging can still be considered beautiful. Silvering roots I dye dark, ironically, because I guess it looks better that way.
Watching my parents age.
Confronting heartbreak and lonely days, exploring the delusion of love between situationships and fantasies, finding modern dating a hopeless mix of confusion, manipulation, disappointment, and humiliation. Dabbling in the dregs of polyamory, I’ve spent the second half of this decade mostly alone, fearing I may no longer have the emotional capacity to love with the same abandon as I used to; that the possibility of a man really loving a woman beyond the flesh or service of her is exceptionally rare.
But perhaps my jungle landscape of love has evolved, too.
Some days love is a pair of scarlet macaws mating for life, bright and beautiful, squawking between the almond trees or soaring high above the space where the jungle meets the sea.
And other days love is an ecosystem, a tapestry of interwoven elements comprising a grander whole.
Or even an entire galaxy of stars and planets, supernovas and black holes – separate but connected, seemingly random in the certain order of chaos, shining wild against the dark.
And maybe, at 40, that’s what growing up is, expanding my definitions of love as I shape-shift and evolve with circumstance.
The geographies of my dreams have changed now, too, it seems.
I once envied the girls with no ties to stable lives, mermaiding away their days along paradise coastlines in the unadulterated freedom of endless adventure – so much so, that I became them. At least halfway, anyway.
Today, I envy the moms my age with adorable surfy families and supportive partners. Friends and strangers bold enough to have published the books they’ve written, building mild empires of their own creativity. Artists who do their art and live their craft as a central mode of being.
They say envy points us in the direction of our deepest desires. In my case, they wouldn’t be wrong.
Sometimes I watch myself performing myself, spectator to both the puppet and the ventriloquist. The voice, the laugh, the intonation. Mirror, shape-shifter, chameleon. Cool, collected, playful, serious. Warm and vulnerable, quiet and reserved. Opinionated or easy-breezy. Coy. Tight-lipped, thin-skinned.
What the circumstances require of me, really. I rise and fall to the occasion.
I don’t know if that’s a good thing, living participant observer to my life from the outside looking in at an unfolding drama on a pixelated screen, often beyond control or agency.
I watch my performance like a film.
Is this how actors feel – watching themselves take on a character, identities fixed for a time, then fleeting, abandoned, transformed?
The language, the gestures, the posturing, the presence both authentic and feigned.
Hollowed out like a strangler fig tree would have its prey. A loss of substance but not necessarily form. Core decomposes into air, foreign body solidifies around the empty space left behind, itself a home of sorts.
A wise friend once said that a truly noble soul is at peace with all of her past selves. But what do you do with all those expired versions of you? Do you cremate them into memory and box them on the mantel? Scatter them across the oceans of your future?
Deep thoughts, 40.
Now we’re back on the dance floor where we belong. Confronting shadows beneath the slow-spinning lights, where we congregate in sweaty freedom, the serendipity of bodies in proximity, fleeting connections born against the humid air and heavy bass. This is the place where nothing changes but everything happens, and somehow, so do we.
Where life and death converge along the bumpy dirt road through the jungle, just like everywhere else.
Between Ouija boards and dance floors, 40 is a reckoning.
But 40 is also a fucking masterpiece.
And with any luck, maybe I’ve got another 32 years and a few more dances left in me.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.