My Man, Shua

Last year I was dating this guy named Joshua. We had been living together for a few months when he invited me to go to Ojai to visit some old friends. The plan was for us to stay with his friend, Astrid, and her much younger live-in boyfriend, Sage.

Upon arriving at Astrid’s house, she came rushing down the driveway in her Stevie Nicks hippie-witch finest and threw her arms around my boyfriend and screeched “Shua! It’s so good to see you!” Sage ambled out in his wooden clogs to greet us and gave a brotherly shout-out to… “Shua!”

Whoa? What? Who? I turned around to see this mystery man. Maybe someone was standing behind us in the patchouli? No, they were indeed talking about my boyfriend. Funny, I’d met his parents, sister, grandmother, friends, business associates, and his neighbors… “Shua”? Nope, never heard it.

When we settled in and had a moment alone, I plopped down in the comfy hemp beanbag chair and asked Josh why they were calling him by this “Shua” name, as it seemed odd to me. He said, “That’s what they call me here in Ojai.” As if that answer made any kind of sense.

Getting to know Astrid was interesting to say the least. She suggested that Josh and Sage bike over to the local farmer’s market to pick up some ingredients for dinner. She opened a bottle of organic, sulfite free Pinot Gris and began to grill me. She asked for details about my life, about how Josh and I had met and then about - big surprise - our sex life. I couldn’t tell if you she genuinely was interested or jealous. When the men returned, she abruptly changed the subject and the four of us prepared some sort of raw vegan meal that ended up making me feel a little queasy.

While lying in bed under a suffocating cloud of sandalwood incense, Josh told me that Astrid had basically slept with everyone she knew. He told me she had some kind of crazy sex drive and couldn't really control herself and that's why her marriage had failed years earlier. How comforting. I wondered aloud why he was telling me this, when it occurred to me that maybe she had in fact slept with him. I asked, "When you say she has slept with everyone, does that include you?" He simply answered, "You say that like it’s bad.”

Um, let me think.

Well, this one time in college I slept with this skinny Goth guy named Blue-haired Gary. For the record, I wish I hadn’t, but that’s a different story - anyway, we all have a past, the point is, I didn’t invite Blue-haired Gary to shack-up with us in our apartment! And if I ever would’ve suggested such a thing, I’d have fucking cleared it first with my boyfriend.

So yeah, a little heads-up would have been nice.

The next few days were more than awkward. Here I was staying in this woman's house, who had at one time been my boyfriend’s lover and all over town people were calling this man a weird name I’d never heard before. Ojai is a small and precious upwardly mobile community northeast of LA that attracts comfortable shoe wearing hippie millionaires, disaffected rich kids, and wanna-be artisans. It’s filled with crystal shops, metaphysical healers, massage gurus and even pet psychics, “Honey, do you think the hamster needs a shrink?” I couldn’t help but wonder, who was this guy I had fallen in love with and why did it take this life-coach infested place to make me realize how different we really were?

I later found out that Schua <ə> is actually something in the dictionary; it's a kind of non-vowel, a neutral sound between two consonants that kind of sounds like a flat "e". When I told Josh this, he became excited at the thought that maybe he should just use this unpronounceable, strange and confusing <ə> as his signature.

When he asked me what I thought, I watched him for a long moment.

“Perfect.”