LA Two

I tried to be a morning writer, but I’m no good at waking up. I can only write before seven in the evening when I’m editing or exceptionally depressed. Starting something new is impossible unless I’m drinking or smoking, or, more often, both, so I start writing after nine. I stick to two or three beers, but I can’t deal without a little. This might be a problem down the road but for now I’m fine. Tonight, I leaned against a fire hydrant, and the world collapsed around me like a fishbowl. I avoid writing until I can’t. I procrastinate with podcasts and long walks until my thoughts are overflowing, threatening to suffocate me. If I stayed at the intersection any longer, I thought I would die. So I walked a block home and started instead.

I told myself I would write about LA. How I’m coming up on two years in the city. I turned twenty-one my first week here, and soon I’ll be twenty-three. By the time my birthday rolls around, it’ll be the last gasp of summer. I let the weeks pass through my fingertips too quickly. I feel I should have done more, maybe rewritten that pilot I always think about or filmed something small. But I was traveling, and I’ve been happy. Lately, I drive north and work and make dinner, go for drinks with a friend. I don’t go home with strangers anymore. I’m getting older.

People my age are married with children. They’re moving on and getting older while I work, write, fuck around, find somebody I like, let it fall apart, and write some more. Rinse and repeat. Most people I know have loved somebody longer than two years, while I can’t seem to make it past ten months. It’s the same with places. I haven’t stayed anywhere longer than a year since 2015, churning through life like one of those rotating restaurants. I always say I’m ready to settle down, it’ll be different this time, but it never is. I get bored and can’t seem to make a good thing work. The clock is ticking, and Europe sounds nice, maybe Copenhagen or something, but LA contains my happiest memories; I won’t be leaving anytime soon. Probably.

Usually, Silverlake ignores me. I’m not rich or fashionable enough for double takes, except when I leave the house in sweatpants and a mean face, as I did tonight. Men over thirty-five love me like this. Earlier, I walked to Trader Joe’s and tried to buy a beer with a picture of my ID because I forgot it in my other purse. They didn’t take it, so I walked home with a two-dollar bag of candy. I don’t walk more than half a mile sober, so I stopped by my car and opened a case of warm beers in the backseat. I drank it even though it was sour, and I was scared of getting sick. I walked some more and tried to picture my life with a partner, usually using the face of a man I saw for a while and then stopped seeing. I imagined leaning into his chest. This is my favorite fantasy. Not kissing, not fucking, just leaning. My legs get so tired, and I’m always exhausted, so the prospect of having a tall man carry even a little bit of me seems like a dream. 

I didn’t like LA until I was thousands of miles away in West Texas. I was high and complaining about it. Make it an interesting place, at least, like New York, I said. I fucking hate LA; it’s infuriating. Either Martha got fed up with me, or I really did talk too much about it because she looked me dead in the eye and said: Stop lying, you love LA. You won’t shut the fuck up about it. At once, I knew that she was right. I just didn’t want to be the kind of person who loved LA because I hated those people. I hated the Chapman grads and the cops at Urth Caffe, men who talked about the grind unironically, blonde, semi-famous women from the hills who are now on TNT. I didn’t want to be associated with the less exciting of the two largest cities in America. When I got over myself, I realized I had always been in love with Los Angeles. 

I used to say it’s because it reminded me of Austin. I still think that a little, but only in residential Silverlake; the eccentric million-dollar homes, the winding hills that feel impossible to walk up unless you’re drunk and it’s cool out, Carhartt skaters smoking under torn fences. Certain bars play a good imitation, but the drinks are more expensive here, and they serve Tecate instead of Lonestar, and there’s never any live music. But that’s just how I remember it. 

I can’t go back to Texas anymore. My mother’s house has become my personal limbo. At the back of my closet, there are stacks of boxes filled with old Christmas dresses and bad typewritten poetry from 2013. My old room is full of everything I can’t bear to get rid of but won’t bring with me either. Other than my mother and a dog, there’s no reason to go back. All my friends are in Nashville or New York or spread out on the West Coast, and Silicon Valley has fucked over downtown Austin, so all my old places are unrecognizable.

I don’t get homesick like I did when I was nineteen and still crazy. With enough distance, all the blotted-out memories take shape. If I go back for too long, the past seeps into my foundation like vines, twisting around the present. Coaxing me out of a defensive crouch, it whispers that it wasn’t all that bad. Every time I cross state lines, Texas sweeps me up in its magic and I fall in love all over again. I forget, but I don’t feel better. When I learned to drive down 2222, I could never stop crying. Now, when I drive those bends, I feel a tug at my heart as the city begs me to stay. That memory replaces the bad one; I become nostalgic for a crime scene. I can’t go home anymore.

Sometimes I’m convinced the bones of LA are set wrong. Arms placed where legs should be and thin skin around a delicate monster, moving like a puppet on a string. If last June was any indication, the city is holding on by a thread. The highways are uncrossable rivers, dividing the town into minute neighborhoods so distinct that they’re basically on another planet. I don’t know much about politics, but if I did, LA’s weird mishmash of rich and poor, old and new, dirty and shiny, would make more sense. All I know is that Hollywood wouldn’t be Hollywood if MGM had decided Jacksonville had better light in the daytime. LA built itself around Hollywood like the eye of a hurricane. We say it won’t fall apart, but it will; The Big One is coming. Everything west of the fault line could crumble into the sea on any given day. People will say they didn’t see it coming, but they just mean they never thought they’d live to see Downtown become beachfront property. If not for an earthquake, it’ll be something else. Even if Abbot Kinney manages to keep from sinking, the city itself is unsustainable. The limbs take the shape of a healthy body, but it’s just a dead man driving down the 405 with a boulder on the gas.  

Maybe I’m just projecting. When I’m doing well, I become suspicious. I wait for the dark figure lurking beyond the tunnel, some earth-shattering crisis that will snap me back into reality. Martha would tell me to trust my happiness, but that’s easier said than done. If last year taught me anything, it’s that nothing matters; we’re all dying anyway. But that doesn’t mean it adds up to nothing. That even with its chaos and diseased parts, there is something ineffable that keeps me here. I walk by the river and feel the cool damp against my skin, and I’m in awe. I find tiny signs of meaning in garden lights piercing through a truck windshield, a flickering television in the apartment across the alley, heat down my back at Will Rogers, taking home sand and finding it burrowed in the bathroom caulk weeks later. I go drinking on the curb in front of the Sunflower House off Sanborn, and the fear melts away. I remember that Los Angeles is beautiful. Even if it all goes up in flames tomorrow, I’m better for having loved it. 

It makes me want to be kinder, more gentle with myself. I want to become the kind of person who writes without beer and has coffee before work. She eats at reasonable hours and hardly ever orders out, seeks out those who respect her and leave space for her to write and work, falling asleep without weed or noise at eleven exactly. For now, I’ll walk and buy furniture for my new place and pick up cigarettes from the balcony, swearing I’ll quit someday like I swore I would quit LA. But I probably won’t, at least not for a while. Maybe the baby won’t like the smog, and I’ll move North and tolerate the rain like I used to say I never could. I’m twenty-two; there’s always time. 

Tomorrow I’ll work and write and live, becoming somebody new while swearing off change.