(i’m having trouble complaining when everything’s so normal all the time)

It’s been almost two months, and Los Angeles has been a very funny friend to me so far. I came here the way I’ve been living here - in shock and despair over what seems, at the end of the day, to be a completely average experience. Landing at LAX with far too much baggage, most of it broken, a finite (and unimpressive) bank balance, vision, and nothing else - what was a pond of your own becomes a sea with plenty of fish just like you. And they all know how to keep swimming, so you must know how to, too - right?

This place is full of glaring contradictions - that was my first feeling, and although I no longer consider it wholly accurate it still occurs to me in times of frustration. I think it must be said upfront that Los Angeles is inescapably American. The uniqueness of the United States is both in the diversity of its realities & in the fact that often, we all end up in the same rooms anyway. The uniqueness of Los Angeles, as I see it, is that every facet of the great American experiment has been facilitated, lived, challenged, abstracted, and quite literally scripted into a Netflix production here. This city, the playground of dominant culture & the setting of so many stories, is what you let it be. Some days are unforgiving and some days motherly and some days, to be honest with you, I go to the beach and have a burrito and it is annoyingly true how little consequence (meaning, even) there is to anything at all.

I am in company here with about a few million people like me, who came here because some personal cocktail of reasons made LA the only place they could go try to make things work. This looks different for each of us, but almost always involves a redundant Americana story and a day job and a big dream. Then there are a few million people - you know some of these ones well - here to play with their money, the limits of their body and their access to everything in the world. They find new problems and new therapies in powders, plants, plastics and they have at their will the construction and destruction of themselves, with plenty of time to experiment. There are also - and I notice we tend to forget about these - the few million people who are from here. My favorites. Whatever you think you know about Angelinos is pretty much true, and it is also true that they are the friendliest & most amusing little batch we have to offer. Something about being from here that frees you from the uglier realities - guilt, shame, whole milk, boredom - and gently grounds you to much nicer ones - which part of this ocean has shells and which rocks and which sea lions, a full healthy smile, the capacity we all have for community. I haven’t met a person from here who doesn’t constantly surprise me with the duality of how much they live & yet how calm they remain - this place embeds in each of them the distinct air of someone born with the world in their back pocket. They have it good here, and they know, and they pour back into it with open, gentle hearts.

For context, it is the type of summer in which I would like to, at the very least, believe I am the main character. I suppose I find myself here also full of contradictions, because to me this main characterhood involves dissolution into a simple little life in the background of this 21st century American nightmare. Last month, at a bus stop in Long Beach, I counted $1.25 in change into the pockets of my olive green linen suit - a very nice outfit the only formal outfit I have for now, and only worn thrice, and bought in the south of France, and bought in a fast fashion strip mall - as I scribbled into my Notes app about how disappointed I was by this thing and that thing. My family, and the job interview I had just finished, and the feeling that the whole world was turning against my very own personal little tide. This complaining ramble that I wanted to call an essay was interrupted as fate fell onto the bus stop in the form of a man with soft blue eyes and a fentanyl addiction who fell onto the bus bench, urgently tying a strip of grey cloth around his veiny bicep which I know was once soft and fleshy like mine. That’s Los Angeles. I shuffled myself up, a suddenly forgettable bit of my bus fare falling onto the concrete, and mumbled something incoherent and unhelpful as I offered the man my half-drank water. For four minutes until the bus came, I stood to the side and thought of how little I had to offer him and how ungratefully I had sat where he now slouched, letting the bits of hope that have kept me upright waste away. He never noticed I was there.

The next week, I learned exactly how much ashwagandha goes in a $26 smoothie (and how white people pronounce ashwagandha) as my new coworker - a frilly blonde SoCal girl with a dreadful attention to looking any more than 62 pounds - complimented my little red shoes. “They look, like, vintagey.” I looked down, noticing the almond butter stains for the first time & cursing myself as if I could have somehow prevented them, and chuckled as I thanked her. I mentioned I got them at a vintage store in Barcelona - a chain that was having a citywide €4 sale. I didn’t mention that at the time I had waited for the sale to come around because I knew the holes in my shoes wouldn’t keep themselves small enough to make it to the fall - I needed a pair of anything to make it to LA, and these were the only sneakers in my size. Happenstance that they were adorably brown-soled with red suede, the first thing I had bought myself since the green linen suit. I kept this from her because I thought her frilliness would push her to judge me - had she ever even known a poor brown girl? Two weeks later I learned her blonde hair hadn’t been cut as long as my head hadn’t been buzzed - we both were waiting on our first check for a haircut. By now, I’d consider her a friend. That’s also, I’m learning, Los Angeles.

The people I want to classify in one way or another refuse to be contained, and god bless the Angelinos for it - the $26 smoothie every morning is for a nanny whose t-shirt, often covered in spit up and organic honey & maca, probably costs more than my lungs would go for on the black market. The sidewalk by the grocery store is covered in smushed fruit from the trees and broken glass from the people. Hummingbirds fly so still outside my window that I cannot believe my eyes, and still my soul is so restless. Every day little things like this correct me, and the biggest contradiction of them all may be that despite my main characterhood, millions of people throughout the history of time have experienced exactly the summer I’ve had here now.

I come from a culture with what sometimes clumsily gets called a “survival mindset” - the aftereffects of colonization’s import of hierarchy, fear, and puritanism, still difficult to name and damaging in ways that outlive the original threat by generations. I grew up the way many of us did, analyzing adults the way an athlete studies tape - gauging reactions to our decisions and performance and preparing early for a world where wellness (financial, social, psychological) was framed as something we have to compete for. This mindset has turned for us first-generation American children into the double-edged sword that most of us fall on. You see, as one of these children, while I will say that I would attribute most every personal and professional success of mine to the strength embedded in me from that upbringing I will just as soon say that the imposition of judgement and fear has in turn bordered on killing me. When there is no need to survive anymore, that same critical energy doesn’t know where to point itself, so it turns inward and curdles into a quiet resentment, the kind that looks at a bus stop or a smoothie line and sees just one dimension of it at a time.

Over time I’ve come to think this city is not a mess of contradiction but rather a more intricate balance, and one that’s teaching me swiftly about purpose in a way that was otherwise obstructed by that same critical lens. Why do we do what we do? Could it be as simple as doing what feels good, so long as it isn’t imposed on anyone else? I’m suspicious of anyone here who claims to have a clean answer. Someone I love told me recently that writers have a tendency to organize their worldview around why this thing is happening to them in particular - maybe it is something about this tendency that has caused me to learn what I have so far about the world in a way that abstracts it from me, dressing up a fentanyl bloom and a stranger’s compliment on my shoes as evidence for a thesis about a city that owes me nothing. I can’t help but feel though, like Sylvia Plath in that journal where she longs to be a man in a bar among men and lay in a field, that it is all in your face here - inescapably American and gorgeously cinematic. Where so far life has gently whispered to me what may be the case, this city slams the truth into my full body with all the monumental strength of the Pacific.

Two months in now and I’ve concluded that I’d like to learn from this Southern Californian funniness - the ability to live like all my new friends here, to see the world laid out in front of me and remember that it is my duty, and also all I have to do, to absorb it and filter what I’d like to let stick around. My skin stretches these days from growing; there is so much delight in our years to play under fate’s abundant sun.