I am wandering around Santa Barbara, thinking what I always think when I am here: Will I see him? I walk by the restaurants we used to frequent and pass by my old office on State Street and wonder: Is he around the corner? As I take a sip of coffee at my favorite bakery, I imagine what it might feel like to look up and see him across the room. It never fails, whether visiting for a few hours or an entire weekend—I go to Santa Barbara asking myself if this might be the day our paths will finally cross after years of no contact. It is as if I’ve decided that because this is where we built our life together, Santa Barbara is the only place where this might happen, so every time I go, these questions follow me as incessantly as my shadow.

More than six years have passed since my divorce was finalized, and these feelings are as strong today as they were the day we signed the final papers that put an end to our six-year partnership. Ours is hardly a unique story, one in which two human beings chose to meld their lives together in every way possible—emotionally, physically, financially, legally—and later chose to unravel that life. In that dismantling, replete with all the anger, confusion and grief that accompanies divorce, we reached a point where communication was no longer possible, something I still can’t fathom. Our partnership was destroyed, and the nest we built was disintegrated like a bird’s dwelling in a forest fire. Over time, the ashes fluttered away, fresh growth appeared, and new nests were built by each of us in faraway trees with different zip codes.

I left Santa Barbara one year after my divorce was finalized, not long after various locations throughout the city became sorrowful landmarks of my decision to leave my husband. Benign entities such as laundromats and grocery stores became scars on the landscape of my past, places that provided a backdrop against some of my hardest revelations, decisions and goodbyes. I did not leave Santa Barbara to escape these memories. It never occurred to me that my heart might be healed if I removed myself from the environment and community that witnessed the crumbling of my marriage, the rocky birth of a new love and the darkest moments of my life. It just happened. I found a house up north, purchased it, moved, and it was only after I felt settled in my new home that I realized moving away was the best thing I could have done.

In every city, town and neighborhood—anywhere we humans build nests for ourselves, our dreams, our marriages and our families—memories linger in peculiar places. I believe all the nests I have built and existed in, from bedrooms to communities, will always hold some molecule of the memories I created there, some powerful enough to yank me back to my past no matter how secure and content I feel in my present. It is why every visit to Santa Barbara always triggers the same repeating chorus—maybe I’ll see him, maybe I’ll see him. I have left my mark on the world in outward ways and subtle ways, and the list of spots on a map that hold my most joyful, painful and harrowing memories looks strange and haphazard. Who could have predicted Bubbles & Beans on Chapala Street would serve as the stage for one of the saddest one-act plays of my life, a scene where my husband walked in carrying the divorce papers I had filed, asking me if I was absolutely certain I wanted to go through with it. I listened to him against the background noise of whirring dryers and jingling quarters and said, “Yes.” He got up, walked out the door, and I quietly finished my laundry, knowing I would never be able to go back to the Bubbles & Beans laundromat again.

After my divorce, I no longer believed Santa Barbara held my future. Santa Barbara was about him, and what we created when we were an “us.” Once the “us” was gone, it was time for me to leave; but rather than marching out the front with dramatic proclamations of a “fresh start,” I slipped out through the back door. No matter how many years pass or how many miles I put between myself and Santa Barbara, the memories we created there will always cling to its branches. I have visited Santa Barbara dozens of times since my divorce, but all the memories I’ve created during those visits exist beneath the canopy of what I shared with him, small growths beneath a dense tangle of foliage that always hangs above me the minute I cross the city limits.

Christine Mason Miller is a Santa Monica-based artist and writer with nearly 15 years of art, design and illustration experience. She is the author of Ordinary Sparkling Moments, a book that combines her artwork and writing about finding wisdom in everyday life. christinemasonmiller.com