a love letter to los angeles

los angeles, you don’t look so tall from down here.

i see you as a child might. a daughter of your shores, i am watching you. you, my father, my lover, my ward—you’re withering like a parent who is slowly, inevitably losing his godliness. you are struggling, trying to cling to the desert and the sea, hoping your mountains won’t move, hoping time will stop at your command or at least put your desperate face on the cover of a magazine before you’re lost to the sea. you can blame san andreas, but he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even after finding the messiah, the world had to let him go. and like him, you’ll only be a martyr if you stand for something, my dear.

you were always surprising me with flowers. from the dry hillsides the blooms burst, as if they could not keep from wanting all of the inexplicable unimaginable impure you. sometimes you brought me roses, grown with the water you’ve been stealing for so many years from someone else’s valley. i buried my face in their soft bobbling heads, always forgetting about the thorns. and after all the beautiful things you brought me, after so many nights spent intoxicated, gazing at your many faces from cool patios strewn with liquor bottles and coffee cups, you abandoned me at dark corners as i waited for the buses that nearly always came late or never came at all.

but as always, i am forgiving you. i remember your inconsistencies and carelessness, your cruel muttered afterthoughts, your chaotic explosions in the street. i remember the warmth of your polluted breezes, your windy peaks and still valleys, your sweet cologne that always appeared to be some intangible mixture of beer and weed and sage and gasoline, some inexhaustible toxic selection of putrid herbs crushed by the whirring wheels of the cars on the freeway. i remember your smiles that flashed quick as the fires that burn our hillsides in september, your hushed domestic contentment romantically shining from high balconies, and your quiet concrete hardness at four in the afternoon, walking below the underpass on 1st street as the scent of urine and booze filled my nostrils and that fourteen year old heroin addict stared right through me as if we were both already ghosts.

and sometimes i wonder if you even believe in death, or in gravity, or in the vastness of the universe. and religion, you say it’s irrelevant—but there you go, making gods out of mortals. and the truth is, i love your gods for their failures, for being so exquisitely human. i once met jesus on hollywood boulevard, but he did not try to save me. i once met a homeless man in boyle heights, and he did try to lead me to salvation. i didn’t go. it smelled like decay.

you have a way of making each fall from grace so artful—or at the very least, so descriptively gory—no wonder so many of the wild people of the world flock to california to fall apart in your arms. you want it all, all the mad ones, the bad ones, all the tired ones, the wired ones, and all the selfish, shallow caricatures of what it is to exist. you want everything from this world and from the next. you even brought the stars to the ground—i saw them in the blinking headlights of the hills on the hollywood freeway.

you taught me what it is to have to love and let go and see what comes back, the way the oceans bring sea glass to the shore. after so many years of tumbling, those violently broken bottles—for so often, love in los angeles comes in a bottle—the love smooths itself into a brilliant stone, solid, and tangible, but as inconsistent in its clarity as the dirty waters from which it came. this is a lesson i’ll have to learn again and again—because every time i leave you, i seem to forget it once more.