Land of fresh starts

The Santa Monica Pier is almost desolate in early morning. Devoid of all people except for runners, joggers, walkers, some fishermen and the homeless, it’s honky tonk morning after beauty almost seems enchanted. Especially on mornings like today when the sun and the smog fight for equal time.

Maris sips her coffee, and looks into the gray/blue rippling waves. Her body then her mind become one with the water. She thinks of nothing but how gently the waves break with an ocassional half fierce break. The Santa Monica Mountains come in and out with the sun and smog. If she believed in paradise, this would be it.

It doesn’t look like a place, that in a few hours, will look like every Jersey Shore town crammed into one large pier in the Santa Monica Bay.
Maris used to wonder what it would be like to follow her heart.
To run away with a man deemed unacceptable by people in her life

She was always the good girl, then the good wife and mother. She would have never dared act on her dreams before Rori graduated high school.

Twenty three years of artifice and pretense. Twenty three years of pretending to laugh at Steve’s jokes. Twenty three years of hosting dinners in progressively larger houses in Oyster Bay.

They had a condo near Lincoln Center. One day she walked in and found Steve on the dining room table with her best friend, Jayne.

He begged her to stay. She took him for everything and more.

Two years later she found herself in California, land of fresh starts. She smiles at the man walking toward her with more Coffee, Tea & Leaf coffee.

Jayne and Alex had introduced themselves to her the day Rori began pre-K.

Nobody suspected a thing when Alex had divorced Jayne supposedly for a blond bimbo he dumped the next year. Alex dropped his law practice and became a professional poker player.

Everybody made fun of that, though not of the millions he made and Jayne didn’t have access to.

Maris made sure that the pre-nup was iron clad. She might be a romantic but she wasn’t a fool.

However, sometimes dreams do come true.

I really don’t know fiction, and become too bogged down on what sounds as if it could be real or not. But there are episodes from own life, that I haven’t put in Courting because they sound too unreal.