Los Angeles is my ex-boyfriend. That’s the simplest way to put it. And it was a rough break-up, and my sense of self was shaken to its core and then bashed into tiny fragments and finally just the dust of me flew daintily from the Malibu cliffs, kept aloft and in dance by the January breeze that whistles against those rocks and trees; then the dust of me twirled, leapt, spun, touched its pointed toe in the ocean and went down with the currents. I was no more.
I left him then and I swore I’d never go back to him, not even to meet for coffee and gossip. Because Los Angeles is the douchebag who would bring his new girlfriend along without telling me, and she would be magazine pretty with bones where her legs belonged and bright big wide-set eyes, the kind that people look at and say “You could lose yourself in those eyes” but that will never be the case for me because I lost myself in Los Angeles and I was looking for the eyes that would find me.
Los Angeles and I were finished. We didn’t call. We didn’t write. We didn’t email. I began to rebuild. To start from scratch. I spent more time with my girlfriends. I learned to call them when I couldn’t stop crying. I learned to listen to their advice and put it into action. When I left Los Angeles, I let my guard down a little, for the first time in many years. I gained ten pounds. I dyed my hair black. I allowed myself to be vulnerable. I allowed myself to let go of old ideas, to do it a different way this time. The woman I am today is built from different material than that of the girl who fell in love with Los Angeles. She is better engineered, she is loosely coupled, and she comes with blueprints now. You can knock her to bits, but she can put herself back together in no time. She knows where everything is supposed to go.
And yet. When I go back. When I acquiesce. When I survive that plane ride and I visit that ex-boyfriend, when I spend the day in his house and on his freeways and his landmarks and his sunlight and amid the energy of the City of Los Angeles. The brightness and the motion and the dreams of the City of Los Angeles. The possibilities of LA. He takes me back to his home, holds my hand as we walk up his steps. He lays down on his living room sofa, the oversized leather one, and pulls me on top of him, so we’re hip-to-hip. He wraps his arms around me, squeezes. He doesn’t want to kiss me. He doesn’t want to take his clothes off. He just wants to hold me like this, to thread my hair with his fingers. “I want you to feel safe for a moment,” he whispers, his cheek pressed against my ear. “I owe you that. I know.”
“Thank you,” I mutter.
“I haven’t changed,” he says.
“No,” I agree.
“You have. And you’re still in love with me.”
“I’m seeing another city now. Exclusively.”
He laughs. “Call me when you’re single again.” I lean my chin against his chest and he twirls a piece of my hair around his finger. “You’ll always have a place to stay here. I still love you, too. That won’t change.”
So, yeah. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m here in Hell-ay, just for a day, to speak to UCLA Anderson’s MBA students about Entrepreneurship in Entertaiment. It’s a part of their annual Entrepreneurship Week, and I am honored and humbled and excited about the opportunity, and I am going to do the best job I can with it tomorrow morning and then get right back on a plane before I start apartment-hunting in this city, beloved, and haunted by ghosts who are trying to kill me.
