The Life I Left (Which Was Actually Pretty Good)

Before I tell you about Mexico, I should probably tell you about San Diego.

Not because I was miserable there and needed to escape. The opposite. I want to be clear about this because the expat story always gets told the same way, with the teller painting their former life as some beige, unfulfilling holding pattern that they heroically left behind. That’s not what happened. I had a full life. A genuinely good one. And I walked away from it on purpose.

I need you to understand what I gave up before I explain why.

San Diego, Specifically

I grew up in San Diego. I ran my marketing agency there starting in 2010. By my mid-thirties I had the kind of life that doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when you actually show up for people over years.

Tuesday nights were movie nights with Bryan. Not every Tuesday, but enough Tuesdays that it was a standing thing, the kind of ritual that anchors a week. Linda was my person for weekends — another single friend, same frequency, and we had perfected the art of hanging out and doing absolutely nothing, which is harder than it sounds and more valuable than most people realize. Both of them told me later they saw it coming. I’m still annoyed about that.

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I traveled. A lot. Pre-COVID I was gone three or four months out of every year. Not all-inclusive travel. Actual countries. India. China. Sri Lanka. Philippines. Costa Rica. Panama. Thailand. The kind of trip where you use a laundromat and figure out the subway and eat something you can’t identify and come home with a story you can’t really tell at dinner because it takes too long.

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Mexico was always in the rotation, but in a San Diego way. That means Tijuana for dinner on a random Tuesday because crossing the border takes twenty minutes from downtown and the food is better than anything you’ll find north of it. Valle de Guadalupe for wine weekends because wine country is 90 minutes from my house and nobody from outside the region seems to know it exists. Ensenada for day trips because Ensenada is pretty and close and has good seafood.

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I never thought of any of this as living internationally. It was just living in San Diego, where Mexico is a direction you sometimes go.

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Mr. F

For about five years, there was a guy. I’ll call him Mr. F. He lived in Ensenada. He came to San Diego frequently. We were whatever we were, which is to say I couldn’t tell you what we were if you put a microphone in front of me and asked me to explain it to a room full of people.

He wasn’t my boyfriend. He wasn’t not my boyfriend. We existed in one of those arrangements that works fine until it doesn’t and then you look back on it and realize you were both waiting for someone to have an adult conversation that neither of you ever had.

What Mr. F was, actually, was useful. He knew everyone in Ensenada. He knew how things worked. He knew which notary to use and which contractor wouldn’t disappear with your deposit and which bureaucratic office required which documents in which order. When I eventually bought property there, he spent literal days of his own time helping make it happen.

The arrangement, such as it was, didn’t survive the move. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Property Logic

Here’s the math I did somewhere around 2021. A basic house in San Diego starts at a million dollars. A basic house in Ensenada costs about what a San Diego motor home costs. I’ve been running my business remotely since before remote work was a personality trait. I already knew the Baja peninsula better than most people know their own neighborhoods. I speak enough Spanish to be dangerous.

So I bought a place in Ensenada. Outright. Which I could do, and which I could not have done in San Diego if I’d started a savings account at birth.

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The plan was simple. A vacation house. A place where my friends and I could stay instead of paying Airbnb rates every time we crossed the border. I’d rent out part of it when I wasn’t there. Keep my San Diego life. Keep my clients. Keep my Tuesdays with Bryan and my nothing-weekends with Linda.

The plan was a vacation house. I want to say that again. That was the plan.

And then, about three months after I closed on that house, I met someone.