Losing L.A.

Again

Well, you knew this post was coming.

Up until about 3:20 this morning I could only remain silent, choking on the billowing black smoke blowing out of my chest, mute with grief.

***

Living in L.A. in 2021, I published a large collection of my own essays, written over a period of ten years. The book was a sort of near-final-draft version titled The Brush Fire Essays: Modern Examinations of Consciousness in Form (I highly recommend it if you don’t mind some typos, have 1500 extra hours you don’t know what to do with and have always wondered what I thought about a bunch of stuff. Someday I’ll complete the final edits. Maybe.).

Anyway.

The last essay included in that book, a love letter to Life, was written February 14th, 2021, Valentine’s Day. Shortly after that, I wrote another essay, Losing L.A.: Disappeared, publishing it on Substack a year later on February 26th, 2022. This was one of the first of a group of essays I uploaded to Substack. The essay indirectly expressed my incredulity at the political events in L.A. which affected my daughter and myself and so many others in such a personal way that I could no longer participate—and intimated my final decision to move out of my beloved L.A.. Out, in fact, of California.

I wondered, over the past week or so, why I hadn’t included that essay in the book. I suppose then that it felt like a good breaking point and that the essay belonged to a new era. But it’s an interesting choice, as it was about leaving L.A., and would have been a fitting final essay for the book—especially considering the cover. Maybe I’ll include it if I ever get to those final edits. In any case, it all seems to have come full circle. But perhaps that is only in retrospect.

The cover of The Brush Fires Essays is, unshockingly, a photo of a California brush fire. While my graphic designer volleyed potential cover after cover at me, I was adamant from start to finish that I must have this picture, this cover. The cover is a tribute to Los Angeles, to the wildfires there and simultaneously to the phenomenon in which a fire sweeps through a life and along with the destruction it wreaks, also clears dead material and allows for new growth. In the introduction, I explain, “The writing…tells a story without being a story itself; one that unfolded as I write through pain, joy, realizations, and re-memberings—each essay burned something less true away to make space for new understandings to arise within the context of my life.”

It is, coincidentally, how Osho recommends finding one’s true self, neti neti, by simply removing impurities. Finding out what you are not reveals who you are.

But this will not be an essay about some desperate grasp at a metaphorical silver lining in the burning of Los Angeles.

No.

If you have lived in L.A. for any period of time, fire (whether natural or not) has been part of your life. You know that sometimes the sky will turn an eerie shade of orange and cast a golden glow over everything. You know that sometimes you’ll be advised by the local weather service to stay indoors because the air quality, from the smoke, is poor. You will likely be all too familiar with fire tracking services. If you live in Topanga, as I did at one time, you’ll be handed a binder with your rental documents. That binder will contain instructions for exactly what to do when there is fire. Not if, but when.

But this will also not be an essay about fire hazards endemic to living in Los Angeles.

No.

I inherently but perhaps dysfunctionally want to see L.A. now. It is incomprehensible to me. I picture over and over landing at Burbank airport, grabbing my luggage as usual off of one of the two carousels, always tearful with joy, stepping out into the L.A. air that feels like freedom. I picture, in that freedom, driving, driving, driving. But everything will only appear as it did in my past: driving the gorgeous PCH in wonder as I have done so many times. Swishing through Malibu on my way to the canyon. Standing in the waves with my daughter on the beach in Malibu, skipping rocks and watching the sandpipers. Strolling through Palisades. Wandering awestruck around the Lake Shrine. Driving past Moonshadows (my daughter and I breaking out in Cat Stephens glory each time). Casting a friendly glance at Malibu Farms as I whoosh by. Watching as the Santa Monica pier approaches in the distance as I drive, peaceful and happy—always and forever not quite believing my incredible luck at somehow landing here, at living here.

Only…I don’t anymore.

I don’t know how to understand that.

I also don’t know how to deal with phrases such as “charred human remains pulled from a structure close to Duke’s”, when what I recall is sitting at a table at Dukes with my tiny daughter and her dad, having a drink. When what I recall is breezing countless times by whatever structure those human remains were pulled out of. It doesn’t make any sense to me. What was thriving life and the background to my life is…what? What is it now??

I don’t know what to do with feeling as if I’ve abandoned a place I loved that is now hurting and in need. I moved because I felt L.A. had abandoned me, requiring me to shoot myself and my little daughter up with poisons so we could go to the damned library or to a restaurant, or so I could enroll her in a ballet class. Never! But it was never L.A. that abandoned me. Never the place. I will always love the land in L.A.. The ocean, the palm trees, the sand, the hills, the air, the trails, the particular way the sunlight hits your skin. The jacaranda trees.

I want to draw some lofty conclusion here that this fire that is telling me to scorch my past and to love this land, where I live now. And maybe it is, in a small way. But I feel a strong resistance. It’s difficult when your being seems corporeally made up of the soil, the sand, the air, the sunlight of a certain place, and to not be there. I am nonsensically afraid that if I completely open up to where I am now that I might be abandoning the first place even more than I already have by leaving it. That I might never be able to return. I know this doesn’t compute. I also know that there is nothing but here, that this beautiful Earth includes both L.A. and my current home and that I can love it all. I know that perhaps all this might be letting me know that I might want to focus on where I am now.

But I am often 3 years old inside and don’t want to.

Sigh.

I am still grieving the L.A. I lost when I left it, and now this: more loss. Apparently it’s not yet time for this sorrow to let go of me. This fire and the fire of leaving is still blazing through my life, still burning dead material. Someday I will see the path it has cleared, someday the new growth will become apparent.

I think.

But maybe not today, not this week. This week is still for the mourning that is still my present and not yet in my past.

I love you, L.A., I will always love you. I don’t care how scorched, charred or decimated; you will always be beautiful. My heart is with you. I will come to you and kneel down on your burnt soil, bowing my head as I run my hands over your scarred skin, my tears cooling your singed earth. I will try as hard as I can to heal your hurt, as you have healed mine. No matter where I live and how much I may eventually grow to love it, you will aways, always, have my heart, L.A.. Always.

image credit Pixabay