Los Angeles is on fire. It’s a city that I have a strange relationship with, to say the least. I used to live there, having moved all the way from Brooklyn into a really beautiful Art Deco apartment, so beautiful that it was an official Los Angeles County Historic-Cultural Monument. I lived in it with the person I thought I was going to marry. I had some of the best and worst moments of my life in that apartment; I’m sure she would say the same. When I left a year and a half later, there was no more apartment or relationship. When I closed the front door for the last time I transitioned immediately from An Adult, someone with all of the things I was supposed to have (House Wife Job Sanity), to just A Person (Suitcase That’s It). I haven’t been back to Los Angeles since, and I have kept very few friends from that era of my life. It’s been a not insignificant amount of time since this happened and I still struggle to write about it neatly and cohesively, which is how I like my writing to be. Anyway, the metaphor of the city being on fire is not lost on me.
About the keeping few friends from my time in Los Angeles: I don’t think I wanted any witnesses to what happened, because that would have meant facing it, and instead I wanted to emerge from the rubble phoenix-like, an unmarred and shiny red baby. After we broke up I lived in London, which served me just fine, no overlap between the two lives. Now I live in New York, and most of my friends have known me since I was 10 years old, so I know that when they look at me, they are thinking less about my time with House Wife Job Sanity and more about us watching Lizzie McGuire together in fourth grade or getting ready for our first co-ed high school dance in seventh grade. But the two friends I’ve kept from my time in LA — Lillian, Kyra — are some of my best friends, and I know we will be friends forever. I ran (dramatically, in the rain) to Kyra’s house in Culver City on the day I realized my relationship was on its way to being over. I found, in Lillian, the first and only person who has, for lack of a better term, “matched my freak” in ways that are so niche and coincidental it still blows my mind (I just made a list of all of the things we have in common to prove my point but it was more exposing than publishing my Social Security Number so I erased it). They both flew to New York to celebrate my 30th birthday with me this past October, booking their flights separately without my even asking. I felt so grateful and so lucky; I thought that losing everything in order to gain their friendship was maybe, maybe worth it.
I am prone to nightmares but the last week’s news cycle has given me several that are still on my mind. Los Angeles is an incredible city (I mean that literally, because to a person who has lived mainly in Budapest, London, and New York, most things about Los Angeles are quite literally unbelievable; the weather and the cheer and the paradoxically affordable, film set-like, vermin-free apartments and houses) and I can still remember what I loved about it (incredible thrift stores where I could imagine that my new-old leather jacket had been worn by a celebrity once, Rad Na Silom, hole-in-the-wall sushi, the farmer’s market, the most beautiful drive you’ve ever been on taking you simply from your apartment to the grocery store, the spooky sense of unease that rides beneath all of the perfection, like marrying rich but your husband is cheating). But I don’t think I’m ready to visit just yet.
Here is a necessary sentence to state that I am not trying to make this national disaster about me and my Big Bad Breakup. Here is a link with useful information on how to help those impacted by the fires.
If you love London, you should see Hard Truths. I watched it with Matt and Colleen at Lincoln Center last weekend and it reminded me of why London is my favorite city in the world. It (the city, but also the film) is full of interesting, funny, sardonic cynics who skew depressed but don’t perceive themselves as such. Therein lies the tension that I love so much and can’t stop going back to, that separates it from anywhere else I’ve been or lived. When I’m there I feel the closest I get to clarity, but I picture that clarity as some kind of sparkly liquid in a beaker which hangs precariously on a scale that tips over into insanity, if I’m not careful. Anyway, I want to have a marathon of Mike Leigh movies if anyone is up for it.
I ate really good food in Queens this weekend — again. I would talk about it more but I went with Miles who is a purveyor of the “I could put you on” meme (which I can’t find but hopefully you know what I’m talking about) so I’m going to keep it to myself. 😈
Love,
Vera x