People Are Strange: Santa Cruz, Vampires, Street Fighters, and The Lost Girl

Echo & The Bunnymen: People Are Strange (Cover of The Doors)
Film: The Lost Boys

OPENING SCENE – “WIDE SHOT”

Cue the boardwalk lights. Cue the distant scream from a ride.

Cue the sound of leather boots on wet wood, and a synth beat pulsing under sea fog.

But this isn’t Santa Cruz. Not yet.

This is Houston, Texas — 1990-something.

A couch. A Coke. My dad. Me, eleven years old and wide eyed.

The movie flickered on — The Lost Boys — and the world shifted.

It didn’t feel like we were watching a film. It felt like the film was watching me.

“You ever seen this one?” he asked.

I hadn’t.

But I didn’t need a plot summary.

The soundtrack landed. The camera soared over the ocean. The boardwalk glowed like something out of a fever dream.

And just like that, I was gone.

⸻

Track One: Cry Little Sister

“Thou shalt not fall / Thou shalt not die…”

The song wasn’t background music.

It was prophecy.

It sounded like something ancient whispered through a TV speaker —

a lullaby for the strange ones.

Even now, I can hear it.

That sacred pulse under the opening scene —

it told me I was stepping into something beyond.

Not just vampires. Not just fog and blood.

And my dad — Chief Mojo Rising — was right there beside me.

Named not literally, but spiritually, after Jim Morrison’s shadow.

He had that same quiet chaos in him. That poetic, cracked-open cool.

That wild spark you couldn’t fake.

We passed the Coke back and forth like communion.

He let the film speak for itself. Let it wrap around us both.

He wasn’t just showing me a movie. He was welcoming me in.

By the time it ended, I wasn’t the same girl who’d changed it to that channel and became entranced by the intro.

I was cooler. Braver. Stranger.

I wasn’t afraid of the dark.

I belonged to it now.

Track Two: People Are Strange

“People are strange when you’re a stranger…”

I recognized the song immediately.

The melody hit first — slinky, sideways, sad.

A song that knew something about you without asking.

But the voice was wrong.

It wasn’t Jim Morrison.

I turned to the screen, then to my dad. I didn’t say anything — I just knew.

He’d taught me The Doors young. “People Are Strange” was one of our sacred songs.

And this version?

It felt haunted. Slowed-down. Echoed through a filter of fog and neon.

But it worked.

It more than worked.

It belonged to the film in the same way the boardwalk did —

familiar, but one step removed.

A version of reality slightly off-axis.

Just like me.

I waited for the credits.

Even at eleven, I needed to know who sang it.

Echo & the Bunnymen.

Of course.

There’s something about hearing a song you love dressed in new clothes.

It’s like meeting an old friend in a dream — same soul, different voice.

That was this moment. That was this movie.

⸻

I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next decade drifting between groups, always a little offbeat, always almost fitting.

But something in this song told me I wasn’t alone in that.

It gave language to the feeling I couldn’t name yet —

that sense of living just outside the glass.

Observing. Listening. Waiting for a signal.

And there it was.

In a vampire movie.

On a couch.

Next to my dad.

A strange song, for a strange girl, in a strange world that was suddenly starting to make a little more sense (or at least feel a lot more rad).

Track Three: I Still Believe

“I still believe / I still believe…”

Sixteen years.

That’s how long it had been since our wedding road trip.

Roswell. The Grand Canyon. Vegas. California.

We were just married, just beginning, just wild enough to believe that love could outrun the world.

Now we’re back.

Similar route. Same coast.

But this time… it’s heavier.

This time, we brought the kids.

And the ashes.

Jamie’s mom asked to be scattered near Monterey — a year after she passed.

So we came.

To honor her. To relive something. To feel it all again, but different.

More memory. More grief. More joy.

Everything turned up. Everything threaded through something else.

⸻

We hadn’t even made it to the boardwalk yet when things started echoing.

The Airbnb smelled like my grandmother’s house — my dad’s mom.

Old wood. A soft sweetness. Comfort tucked into corners.

Jamie said it reminded him of my dad’s house too.

I didn’t even know I’d been waiting for that scent until it found me.

It wrapped around me like a blanket stitched with ghosts.

Not sad. Just present.

Like they were saying,

“We’re still here.”

⸻

And then came Santa Cruz.

The boardwalk stretched in front of us like a memory unfolding.

We made it there early. The rides were shut down.

No music blasting, no crowd noise — just the ocean behind us and the quiet creak of the place breathing.

It felt… still.

Like the movie had wrapped but the set was still standing.

Like we got there before something happened — or maybe after.

We didn’t rush anything.

We spent most of the morning walking the beach, collecting shells with the kids.

Tiny treasures in sandy hands, Maggie squealing every time she found one that sparkled.

Jaxon walking ahead, in his own little rhythm. Gracie laughing like she was made of seafoam.

We wandered into the arcade like it was second nature.

No lines, no chaos. Just quarters on preloaded cards, buttons, and that warm hum of old machines still doing their job.

We spotted Street Fighter II and Jamie smiled — not at me, not at the kids, just this quiet little grin, like something clicked into place.

Jaxon stepped up next to him like he was always meant to.

They played.

Same game Jamie played when he was a kid.

Same stance, same focus.

Jaxon held his own.

I didn’t say anything. Just stood there, watching them. Taking photos quietly.

Not just as a mom. Not just as a wife.

But as someone fully there: present, grounded, grateful.

The ocean. The arcade. My family.

Santa Cruz.

Not how I imagined it.

Better.

I still believe.

In movies.

In music.

In bloodlines and memory and Street Fighter tournaments under arcade lights.

In the kind of love that keeps circling back, asking you to remember — and choose it again.

Track Four: Lost in the Shadows

“Say hello to the night…”

This trip wasn’t just a vacation.

It was a soul mission.

We weren’t just here for fun.

We were here because of death, and love, and promises made.

To scatter ashes.

To retrace steps.

To feel the weight of everything we’ve lived through since the last time we stood on this road.

Roswell.

Flagstaff.

Vegas.

California.

Same places mostly. Different people.

Back then, it was just Jamie and I — young and electric and unstoppable.

Now? It’s deeper. Heavier. Bittersweet.

We’ve said goodbye to parents.

We’ve brought children into the world.

We’ve learned how to keep loving each other when the road is long and the night is thick with silence.

⸻

Driving through Arizona, the sky was big and soft and gold —

and I felt my dad there,

somewhere between the desert and the distant mountains.

It was his kind of landscape.

Reservation land.

Navajo country.

Spirit territory.

Jamie felt him too.

Just a flicker.

But enough to say:

“He’s with us.”

And in California — in Monterey, in the wind over the ocean —

we felt his mother, Margie

like the sea had been calling her home this whole time.

⸻

We carried them both.

In the way we looked at the sky.

In the way we let the kids run free.

In the way we didn’t rush through the heavy moments.

This trip was full of shadows.

But we weren’t lost in them.

We were walking through them with purpose.

With memory.

With love.

Track Five: Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me

“Although I search myself, it’s always someone else I see…”

We found it by accident.

Or maybe not.

The Lost Boys house, tucked behind the trees, almost hidden — like it didn’t want to be seen by just anyone.

Like it was waiting for someone who’d know what it meant.

I didn’t walk up.

Didn’t knock.

Didn’t take a hundred photos.

I just sat there,

watching from behind the fence,

like I was looking through a screen again —

but this time, it was real.

This time, I was in the frame.

And something about that moment felt holy.

Like I was standing in a place where all my timelines had curled together.

Eleven-year-old me.

Thirty-something me.

Mom me.

Daughter me.

All of us standing there in the silence,

watching the house through the branches,

and whispering the same thing:

“We made it.”

⸻

I didn’t need to go inside.

Just to see it was enough.

To know that something I had carried in my heart for so long

— a scene, a song, a strange and beautiful film —

wasn’t just a dream or a flicker of nostalgia.

It was real.

And it had waited for me. (Or at least it felt that way within that golden moment).

⸻

We left not long after.

The sun was starting to dip.

The kids were getting tired.

But I felt full — like I’d found a thread I didn’t even realize had been loose all this time.

Some movies change your life.

Some songs become mirrors.

Some places — even the ones you’ve never been —

are part of your story long before you arrive.

⸻

I was never a Lost Boy.

I was always the Lost Girl.

The one watching from the outside,

singing along in the dark,

waiting for the lights to flicker back on.