Coming Into Los Angeles
Flyin' in a big airliner
Our Lyft driver picks us up at LAX and takes the scenic route home, cutting through the Hollywood Hills instead of crawling along the hot asphalt of the 405 and the 101. In the four years I’ve lived in Los Angeles, I’ve learned to say “the” before the numbers of highways, but I still struggle with calling them “freeways.” It feels as foreign on my tongue as the Spanish phrases I’ve been slowly adding to my vocabulary.
The road is twisty and tight, weaving between stone walls dripping with jasmine and bougainvillea, and sensible cars parked in front of two-million-dollar homes. (Iron gates block the brick driveways of the ten-million-dollar ones.) After a ten-hour flight, I feel queasy enough to roll down the window and accept the ensuing blast of hot, outside air. It smells of recent rain, tropical flowers, and sun-warmed eucalyptus. I’m surprised to breathe in and find it familiar. These are not the scents of my youth.
I’m from the Midwest. I’m of the Midwest. Recently, one of those overeager genealogy sites sent me an email to tell me that 19 of my relatives are all buried in one Illinois cemetery. As near as I can tell, the majority of my ancestors arrived in the New World some 300 years ago, made their way as far west as Chicago, and never left.
I left. I ran.
My siblings and cousins have scattered in all directions—to Pennsylvania, Utah, Tennessee, and Georgia—but in nine generations of Americans, I think I might be the first in my family to fully complete the journey “from sea to shining sea” and make my home on the West Coast.
Los Angeles does shine. Not just the sea, but all of it. It’s almost blinding to step out under the cloudless sky after a month away. Everything in the city of angels is golden. Everything glows. The Virgin Mary’s halo could have been crafted from LA sunshine. It turns out I like this light.
When I was 23, I moved from Illinois to Colorado because that’s where the love of my life lived, and because I wanted out. I fell in love with Colorado just as I fell in love with Kevin. I didn’t have any grandmothers or great-grandmothers buried in Colorado soil, but I grew my own roots there. My son was born there. I learned the secret rites of Chapstick tubes and Nalgene bottles. I stopped laughing when anyone said, “King Soopers.” I gazed at the Rockies on the western horizon and my chest loosen and my shoulders relax.
My new husband, though, was never a Coloradoan—not really, despite having lived there for years before I ever met him. He was, and will always be, a California child. Orange groves lived in his heart the way cornfields lived in mine. And it was never a question that I loved him more than I loved corn. Or mountains.
Back in Los Angeles, I walk to the taco stand down the street and order two tacos and a cucumber lime agua fresca. Biting into a corn tortilla filled with smoky poblanos and salty cotija, sipping on my sweet-tart drink, it tastes like LA. I find myself feeling nostalgia for this place I’ve barely gotten to know.
He moved before I did. For eleven long months, I stayed behind to see our son through his last year of high school, pack our belongings, and sell our house. I didn’t want to leave. I felt like the roots I’d grown were being ripped violently out from under me. I tried to meditate to ease the stress and found myself bawling in huge, heaving sobs. I tucked it all back inside so that when we drove away for the last time, I felt nothing but relief. It took us three days of driving to reach California.
Around the corner from our house, there’s a bar shaped like a whiskey barrel. LA loves its quirky icons—Circus Liquor’s neon clown, Randy’s giant donut, the Hollywood sign. In the evenings, music and voices drift up from the bar patio, where patrons sip cocktails beside a hut shaped like a pipe-smoking bulldog. I’ve sat there too, but mostly I listen from my balcony. It’s a comfort knowing that, steps away, people are laughing and singing and enjoying their lives. I feel alone here, but the murmur of the crowd reminds me that I’m not.
Hanging lanterns cast patterns of warm light on the wall and a blanket lies on the bench beside me, but the night air is neither hot nor cold. I steady myself and feel the just-rightness of it. I take a deep breath. I don’t have roots here, not yet, but they’re growing. I’m here. I’m in LA. I’m back. I’m home.