My Second Saturn Return

On leaving Los Angeles

Saturn, you’re a handsome bastard of a planet. Photo by NASA.

Bonjour, mes amis!

It’s quite possible, if you’re an astrology fan, that you’ve heard of the Saturn Return. It’s the time in your life when the planet Saturn travels all the way around the Sun and returns to the place it was when you were born. This takes about 29.5 years. It’s usually a time of commitment, winnowing, added responsibility, and so forth. You’re almost 30 years old, so you’re on the precipice of the next phase of maturation. Maybe you got married then, moved away, had a baby, started a business. It can depend a lot on what else is happening in your chart.

During my first Saturn return — on the day it was exact, in fact — I was declared totally, temporarily disabled. I’d just moved to Los Angeles in the middle of a divorce and was estranged from my family. I endured incredible financial hardship, depression, pain, and isolation. I also started writing fiction seriously then with “The King of Shadows.” All of these events had long-lasting consequences in my life.

As I saw the second Saturn Return was coming up, I was anxious. For mathematical-astronomical reasons, it was going to hit early, too. I couldn’t imagine enduring that same level of hardship again. My life overall is so much better now. Certainly, that could change in the blink of an eye, but the astrologers I respected all said that the second Saturn Return is gentler. That, if you dealt with the things that you faced in the first Saturn Return, you’d be in a much better position to deal with this third act of life.

There should be more sword fights in Act 3. Photo by K. Mitch Hodge.

I’m in the thick of things now, and I can say with confidence that, although it’s so far not as bad as the first one, it’s still kind of brutal.

The same themes are in play — health, family, and home — which isn’t a surprise. Thankfully, the health stuff is minor compared to last time. My job is fantastic; I just celebrated my 4th year as a full-time employee there. But the home stuff has been exhausting and overwhelming. We’re selling our house and buying another at the same time, which is the kind of champagne hell you wish on your posh enemies. We’ve known for a while now that we have needed to move — at first we thought just out of the neighborhood, then later we realized there was a specific place we needed to land. We made the difficult but necessary decision to move forward.

Then, last October just as we were about to put our house on the market, something horrendous happened. It was like the universe shouting GTFO.

Trigger warning: Suicide

Saturn, Ruler of Death

October 2025. It was close to 11:00 p.m., an hour past my screen time. I was in bed with my earplugs in, yet I could hear some kind of commotion outside. I ignored it. I’d long since decided that, short of a fire, I no longer cared what went on around us.

Bret ran into bedroom. There were screams and flashing lights outside. Was it ICE? The apartment across the street has a number of Spanish-speaking folk. I dragged myself out of bed with my phone in hand.

Through the kitchen window I could see this wasn’t ICE. The street was packed with police cars, more than I’d ever seen in one place, and I’ve lived in Los Angeles almost 30 years. One LAPD SUV had even parked halfway up on our street lawn.

When we got outside, that’s when I saw what was really happening. My mind reeled as I saw a woman was lying face down on the asphalt of the parking area behind the apartment building across the street, immobile, unresponsive. Her daughter, probably late teens, was wailing. "Why did you do it, Mommy? Why didn’t you talk to us?" Her daughter continued to cry out — for answers, for an ambulance — as police paced the scene. Two fire trucks pressed into the street between the patrol cars. The personnel of the smaller one took away the woman on a stretcher. It’s possible she survived but we couldn’t tell.

I couldn’t process what was going on. I said to Bret, “She must have been shot. Or maybe she was hit by a car.” He shook his head. “Come on,” he said and squeezed my hand. “Let’s go inside. It’s ghoulish to stare.”

According to the Citizen app, the woman had jumped from her third-story balcony. When I saw the reports, that’s when it finally sunk in.

The image of the woman’s body and the sound of her daughter’s cries haunted me for months. I resigned as block captain with the LAPD. I told Officer Perez that I’d done an enormous amount of work for a community that was only deteriorating. I was ready for a community that would take care of me. We’d experienced many weird, crazy, dangerous things in our neighborhood, but this was really the portcullis slamming shut. Like Indiana Jones, we needed to hurl ourselves under it and out before it closed.

The horrors of that night eventually lost the worst of their hold on me as we worked on selling the house. We had a false start before the holidays and then I got really sick. After the beginning of the year we changed agents. That made the difference.

Saturn, Traditional Ruler of Community

Goddammit, this is huge.

I moved to Los Angeles on January 15, 1997 because I was doing a film mentorship with Clive Barker. I survived the Worst Valentine’s Day Ever one month later. And the two months after that, as I mentioned, I was disabled and jobless, which would happen again many years later. But slowly I recovered, matured, found my tribe, and succeeded not at what I initially set out to do, which was screenwriting, but certainly overall in life. I met and befriended some of my artistic heroes. Some of my friends became artistic heroes. I wrote dozens of short stories, poems and essays, as well as award-winning novels. I learned my way around all kinds of blades. I went to Middlebury College for 7 weeks, moved to France for a year, and adopted a home away from home. I opened my heart waaaaaay too often to people who didn’t deserve it but fortunately found someone worthy of it. I got married again.

He really is wonderful.

I have so very many friends I love deeply. Whole communities of writers, editors, publishers, sword masters, stunt people, performers, game designers, creators of every stripe. I have friends who are showrunners, producers, writers, and directors. Professional comedians, carolers, and cosplayers. And so many more people who have all kinds of other talents. Or all of the above talents. SO. MUCH. TALENT.

So many generous, loving people who have been there for us.

In my heart, my arms are still firmly wrapped around each and every one of them. Fortunately, we didn’t leave the state and we’ll all still be very much in touch. And I expect our new location will go a long way towards healing a lot that I lost these last 10 years in sheer aggravation and torment to make life easier, not just for us but for the neighborhood in general. We’ll even be closer to other family and friends who are dear to us. It’s wild but good.

I’ll be at StokerCon! (I think.) Hope to have writing news soon.

Until next time,

xoxo

Maria