The strangest part about coming back home to LA — for the first time since I left last year — is that it doesn’t feel strange. The last time I made a major move it was from Phoenix to Los Angeles, over five years ago. Every time I returned to Phoenix it felt like a new city. Familiar intersections were no longer familiar — a gas station replaced by a Taco Bell, an Applebee’s now an Olive Garden, the drive-thru liquor store where they all knew my name consumed by an expanding 24-Hour Fitness. New freeways. New malls. New stoplights. Los Angeles feels immutable in comparison. Not a single Chevron out of place. Even in a rental car my hands and feet steer unthinkingly up and down PCH; the blinker is on before I even realize that I need to turn. My body still knows this city. This city still feels like home.
It’s Halloween night and the streets are packed with skinny drunk chicks in their skinny drunk costumes and the wolves who want to eat all those skinny drunk Red Riding Hoods and the cops who have to deal with the aftermath. It hurts me to watch it, for so many reasons. That isn’t my scene anymore. It hasn’t been for a long time. I surrendered it, but in so many ways it feels like it was taken from me forcibly. By some manner of masked goblin, like those wandering the streets tonight, reeking of beer and pissing in alleys and taking inventory, determining who might be willing to surrender something tonight. And I don’t want it back, not at all. But maybe I want to want it back? Is this envy? I know that happiness for me, today, is not going to be found in that oh-so-LA scene. But it used to be there. Betrayal. That’s the emotion I feel. I feel betrayed by all of this. Like it never warned me that I couldn’t stay forever.
Tonight, I’m staying at the Embassy Suites by the airport. In terms of location, spaciousness and price, it made the most sense. But I realized after reserving it that this is the hotel I stayed in the first time I visited LA, for the interview for the job that would land me in the very last place in the country I’d expected or wanted to live. The smell of the lobby was familiar, water-tinged and perfumed and smoky.
I remember once complaining to a college writing professor that I didn’t understand how to use symbolism. He chuckled. “Sasha,” he said, “you don’t need anyone to explain symbolism to you. It’s in your DNA.”
