Tropical Avoidance

Before Covid, I traveled every couple weeks for work. I had been assisting a wardrobe stylist based in Seattle for seven years - she was like a true big sister to me. So even after my husband and I moved from Seattle to LA in 2018, I still flew up to Seattle every month to assist her during style-outs at her corporate office. Then I’d go back to LA for a week. Then fly from LA to meet my boss wherever our location shoot was that month - Charleston, Tulum, Key West, the Hamptons, Scottsdale, Mallorca. Then back to LA for a week. Then to New York for a shoot at Pier 59 or Milk Studios. I honestly loved this schedule. I loved that my boss and I were so close - eating all of our meals together in every foreign and odd, tropical, touristy city we were in. Making inside jokes with makeup artists and PAs. Sharing a bottle of wine in one of our hotel rooms after grueling, sweaty days filled with ugly clothes on unsteady rolling racks in lush Hawaiian mountains, or staggered red rock hills in Sedona. I loved having a week off in LA with nothing to do except watch documentaries and Bravo in bed, take sunny strolls to my local Echo Park coffee shop. I would go for hours-long walks up and down the steep San Francisco-like hills in my neighborhood and listen to books like “Bad Blood” or a Tiger Woods biography (I patiently listened to his entire golf-filled life story eagerly waiting for the part where his Swedish model wife bashed in his car with a golf club after finding out he had been partying and cheating for years).

But now with some perspective - and five years since the Covid lockdown - I can see that this schedule created an ease to avoidance. I didn’t have to think too hard about why my husband had basically stopped having sex with me, or why he never liked to go to bed at the same time as me. I was always busying my mind thinking about packing my bag for my next trip, if I needed to buy a new item for whatever climate I’d be working outside in for hours. My husband and I always had a nice time when we were together for these brief moments at home - and we never, ever fought. We would laugh and tell stories, sometimes go out drinking with friends, though our party days had really slowed down since leaving Seattle (which had been a good motivator for our move - time for sunshine and health and fresh produce and an end to party drugs and 4am nights).