Rowan had a plan. This is important context. Before I say anything else, I want you to know that he had spent actual time — like, Thursday-night time, time that could have been spent watching something — building a Google Doc itinerary for our Friday in Santa Barbara.
It had headers.
The first header was "Morning (Optimal Light)." The second was "Midday (Wine Logistics)." The third was just the word "Vibes" with a sun emoji, which I think was supposed to mean the afternoon but he never fully explained it.
The Natural Coast Wine Festival was on Saturday, technically, but Rowan had decided that Friday — Restaurant Week opening day, golden coastal morning, his annual attempt to prove he was the kind of person who had his life together — was the real event. He'd read something online about April being the "real New Year" and had taken it extremely personally. "This is our reset," he said. I asked what we were resetting from. He said "the general vibe of the last few months" and closed the laptop like that settled it.
He also said it would be warm.
I want to be very clear about this part. I asked, specifically, I said: "Should I bring a jacket?" And he looked at his phone for approximately two seconds and said, "It's going to be almost seventy." And then he paused and said, "The sun is already doing a lot." I do not know what this means. I still do not know what this means. The sun was indeed out when we got there. The sun was doing absolutely nothing temperature-wise. It was 54 degrees and the wind off the water had opinions.
Rowan was in a linen shirt.
He had chosen the linen shirt because, and I'm quoting, it "read coastal without trying too hard." It was trying extremely hard to not be a jacket. He kept holding his coffee cup with both hands and turning slightly away from the ocean and calling it "refreshing."
"This is refreshing," he said.
"You're shivering," I said.
"I'm not shivering, I'm just — I'm alert. The air is waking me up."
The first restaurant on his itinerary didn't open until eleven. It was nine-forty. He had known this and had, for reasons I cannot explain, built it into the plan anyway, listed under "Morning (Optimal Light)" with a note that said "arrival buffer." We stood on State Street in the arrival buffer for twenty minutes while he cheerfully narrated the neighborhood like a tour guide who was also cold but refusing to identify with that experience.
The wine festival logistics section of the document had six bullet points and a link to a parking map. The parking map was for Saturday. We were there Friday. "It's probably similar," he said. It was not similar. We circled for a while.
Here is the thing about Rowan, though. And I say this as someone who was standing on a beautiful California street in April sunshine that was genuinely doing nothing, watching my boyfriend gesture confidently at a parking structure that was closed for some kind of infrastructure work — the man is so earnest about it. He really had built the document. He really had thought about the optimal light. When we finally found a spot and walked down toward the harbor and the water was enormous and sparkling and the mountains were just sitting there being unreasonable and beautiful, he turned to me with this look like he had personally arranged all of it.
"See?" he said.
And the thing is, it was gorgeous. It was genuinely, stupidly gorgeous. The kind of morning where you can't actually be mad because the backdrop keeps undermining you.
I was wearing his sweatshirt by then, which I had found in his bag despite his earlier assurances. He had packed it without mentioning it. He had, on some level, known.
"You packed a layer," I said.
"I packed options," he said.
He bought me a glass of something local and cold at the first place that opened and we sat outside in the sun, which had, by eleven-fifteen, finally started doing a little something. He pulled up the Vibes section of the document and showed me it was just a picture he'd saved of the harbor.
"This is it," he said. "We're in the Vibes section."
Reader, we were.