My beach romances have been disasters.
On the Silver Strand in Coronado, a date tried to teach me to surf. I nearly drowned. I called it quits after a hard face-plant off the surfboard and into the wet sand. A date once left me stranded on McAbee Beach in Monterey when I refused to sing a Kenny Rogers song with him during karaoke. I sat in the dark on the cold sand for an hour, waiting for a ride home. On East Beach in Santa Barbara, I tried to impress a date with a from-scratch picnic, but sand got into everything. (Pro tip: Sand always gets into everything.) He teased me about the inedible, sand-crusted “crunchy chicken.”
But I thought my luck had changed when I met a handsome musician in Pismo Beach.
He was playing guitar and singing at Harry’s Night Club & Beach Bar, a block from the pier. He was tall, good-looking and funny. I was there with friends for a wedding after-party. He flirted with me from the stage and made me laugh. After his set, he invited me to go for a walk. Daylight on the beach is nice, what with the sunshine and all, but moonlight on the beach is incredible. He leaned in and kissed me, and I let him. I blame moon magic and too many Coronas with lime.
A month later, a friend took me to Pismo Beach for my birthday. We drove south in my Ford Mustang convertible with the top down and parked in the beach parking lot. Across the street from Harry’s. Where the hot musician was playing. Again. We spent the afternoon there. He asked us to stay when his band loaded in for the nighttime set, and we did.
And then … well, it was my birthday. I hooked up with the hot musician.
I didn’t see it as anything more than a starry-eyed fling that began on a warm summer night in a funky little beach town. Turns out, flirting was his thing. He flirted with women in every town with a beach in San Luis Obispo County: Avila Beach, Moonstone Beach, Spooner’s Cove, Cayucos State Beach, Morro Strand State Beach. It was part of the act, he said, and besides, we weren’t serious.
When we were alone, he was charming and attentive. He drove to the North County to be with me every night, even after late-night gigs that were often an hour or more away. Over time, I let myself fall hard. The only problem was that I was looking for long-term love, and he wasn’t.
He broke my heart again and again. And I beat my head against the wall trying to turn him into someone he was never going to be.
Then one day, he said the most honest words I’ve ever heard anyone say: “I know I can be self-centered, and I know that doesn’t work for you. But it’s worked for me all my life, so I don’t see that changing.”
I know he meant it when he told me that he loved me. He waited almost a year to say those words for the first time. But I realized then that being in love meant something different to him from what it meant to me. Our mistake wasn’t falling in love. It was trying to force a love that didn’t suit either of us.
Maya Angelou once said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” I didn’t believe him the dozens of times he showed me that he wasn’t going to settle down, but I believed him when he told me flat out. And I knew I deserved something more.
I’ve never had a knack for keeping a boyfriend. But I do have a knack for staying friends with ex-boyfriends, and the hot musician was no exception. We went to the movies sometimes and we stayed in touch, even after he moved a thousand miles away nearly 10 years ago to care for his elderly mother.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I moved south from downtown San Luis Obispo to Pismo Beach to be closer to the water. I am a writer and an introvert who kind of enjoyed having an excuse to stay home all the time. But the isolation was too much even for me. So I moved into a 100-year-old beach bungalow a half-block from the ocean. After being confined to my house for months alone, I felt such freedom walking on the beach every day without a mask. There were always other human beings on the beach with me, and although we were physically distant from one another, I felt a connection to them. I breathed in the cold, crisp air so deeply my lungs hurt.
Then the hot musician reached out to me after his mother died. He was sad and alone too. I invited him to come back home, back to Pismo Beach, to rent the spare bedroom in my bungalow, two blocks from the beach bar where our failed romance began. He moved in, and we took walks together out to the end of the pier, on the same beach where we’d once shared a kiss.
First, we fell in love. Then we were friends. We were friends for a long time. And then 20 years after we first met, we became roommates. He’s in the other room as I write this, probably watching basketball. Maybe “Family Guy.” He takes the trash out now and then. He brings me tortilla chips, so I get enough salt. Sometimes cheesecake — last night, my favorite Meyer lemon. He still makes me laugh. But we’re both different people now, and he no longer breaks my heart.
I never found lasting love at the beach. But I did find a lasting friendship. And it took me way too long, but I found a determination to be true to myself. For now, those things are more than enough.
The author, a lifelong Californian who earned an MFA from UC Riverside Palm Desert, is the fiction editor for Kelp Journal. You can read her work at leannephillips.com. She’s on Instagram: @leannebythesea
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