The beginning of everything else

Summer Survivors Club

Looking for apartments is a job that I need to get done. I'd like to view some places this weekend and hopefully make a decision. It will be one more item ticked off of my list and one step closer to LA being my home again. I've spoken to my parents about my imminent return and they offered that I could move back there if I need to whilst I look for a place to live. It's a nice offer, and I'm grateful, but I would like my own space from the offset. At 26 I would rather not have to take my girlfriend back to my parent's house for the evening, no matter how much she gets on with them.

I'm looking for a one-bedroom place, nothing too big, pool preferably. The area that Elle lives in is around an hour commute to my office and 45 mins from hers, so I'm looking at the areas somewhere between the three so that I'm not adding even more driving time when we spend time at each other's places. 

If you had asked me 2 weeks ago if searching for somewhere in LA would feel like a chore, I would have thought that you were crazy. I would have told you that LA means Elle, specifically LA means Elle wants to give us a chance, and so there is no way that this could be anything but amazing. Now I am sitting here however scrolling through these listings, I am struggling to get excited, which I don't understand, there are a lot of great places in the right areas for the right budget, so why isn't my heart fully in this?

Placing my laptop down and grabbing a beer from the fridge, I start to run through this in my head.

Do I want to be with Elle? Yes, more than anything - that goes without saying.

Do I want to live in LA? Absolutely, to be with Elle of course, but also close to my family, and I'm looking forward to starting at the new law firm, so whatever my issue, it's definitely not that.

I know that this is what I want, I've wanted it for years, and if I didn't have to fulfill my notice at work, I'd be on a plane tomorrow morning back to LA, knocking on her door. This weekend had been everything I had hoped for, proof that we were still 'Shelly and Noah' with added extras that had come along as we both matured. 

So what's my problem? What's getting in the way? I need to figure this out and quickly because it is absolutely not something that I want to worry Elle with.

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The last Wednesday night of each month has been known as the 'Summer Survivors Club' for a while now. It's named after the trip that Lee and I took for the first two weeks of summer after our freshman year. The plan was simple, pack up the car and head down to Mexico for a couple of weeks of rest and relaxation whilst conveniently avoiding Noah's visit home.

When we started planning the trip around Thanksgiving, I had known that I wouldn't be ready to see him by the summer, as much as I had wanted to. I had kept telling myself that he would probably have a new girlfriend to bring home and I knew I needed to be well-and-truly over him before seeing that. I had seen a few unkind comments on social media from some of my least favorite classmates in those first few weeks after our breakup. All of them discussing how he was free now to pursue the hot blonde cheerleaders at Harvard, but I had known that wasn't the worst-case scenario. Whilst I might have been surprised when we first started dating that the Noah Flynn saw me as someone other than the awkward kid he grew up with, it didn't take long to realize that I was exactly his type. He preferred brunettes, he preferred athletic curves, he preferred big eyes and plump lips, and most importantly he loved the dorky girl who could beat him at video games, who argued with him, who wasn't afraid to make a spectacle of herself, and as he put it - who didn't fall at his feet. Flynn might have had his giggling hair-twirling fan club, but Noah wanted somebody real. So I knew that when he did bring someone home to meet his parents, I would be less concerned about a model than I would be if he brought somebody home that could have been me.