When we were finally allowed to exit the plane in Los Angeles, I saw the emergency workers huddled around the guy from the flight, trying to convince him that it was really in his best interest to go with them.  He wasn’t getting out of this one easy.  We were four hours late.  It was after midnight.  I got my bag and headed down to the Uber pickup zone.  After COVID they’d stopped doing shared rides on the Super Shuttle, so it was almost as expensive to book a ride with them as it was a taxi.

An Uber to Huntington Beach was fifty dollars that night.  I could live with it.  The driver, Bill, didn’t want to talk, so that was a double blessing.  The same thoughts go through my head every time I get back to Southern California.  What am I doing here?  Why here, in the most impossible to navigate city on the planet? 

We moved there when I was seventeen.  I never got my footing in life.  But it is still the closest thing to a home that I have.  I guess that’s why.  Eventually, you go where your family is.  If you sometimes think they don’t care about you, wait until you get a load of the rest of humanity.  The last rune stone in my bag was Wyrd, the rune of destiny.  That’s what I was doing back in Los Angeles.  It was my destiny to be there.

When I got to Huntington Beach it was freezing cold.  I headed straight to the camper in back and climbed under my dusty sleeping bag.  That’s how exhausted I was.  In the morning, I woke up and went into the house to let my mother know I was back.

I was still energized from all that traveling I’d done, so got on my bike and headed out to see what was new.  When you are off on a trip it seems like uncountable days have passed.  When you are stuck in one place, caught up in the same routine, Tuesday is just trash day.  I stopped at 7-Eleven to get a large coffee.  The cashier, Hilda, did a good job pretending to be interested in the fact that I just got back to Mexico.  She was keeping her eye on the homeless guy with the backpack who was loitering around the coolers.

I rode my bike up to the end of Bolsa Chica, then turned around and rode south, wind blowing in my face the entire way.  Once I got back to the house, I took the last rune stone, Wyrd, and set it on the table in front of the plum tree.  That was to be the last picture of the trip.  It was a faceless rune, black like onyx, with a rim of sunlight around it.  One…two…three… That wasn’t so hard.