The Short Goodbye (Fare Thee Well, Los Angeles)
He always said he could never move back. But never has a funny way of showing up as a Michigan driver’s license with my name on it. Reality’s forceps pulled us away from the path we thought we were on, as it does. In a matter of hours, minutes really, what we thought was important became dwarfed by the news of my brother-in-law’s stroke. Last rounds and visits to those places we hadn’t gotten to were exchanged for emergency airlifts and intensive care units. When tragedy strikes, your world cracks open and you do your best to fall in with grace. Oddly, moving a month early and to a completely different place worked out better for me. I’d never been good at leaving parties let alone cities. I had been dreading the long goodbye for a myriad of reasons but mostly, I believe, it would make it too real that I was leaving so much behind. The people who mattered showed up to say goodbye in the backyard that had grounded my LA thirties. Without a doubt, this backyard was sacred ground. Thousands of cigarettes were smoked, politics debated, haircuts, quarantine bubble hangs, tie-dyeing. I cried a lot there, laughed far more.
My daughter and I left at the break of dawn on the first day of summer, leaving behind the last bit of good weather LA had to offer, the kind where you still need a sweater at the beach, just before the heat dome settled onto the southwest. We were welcomed into the clutches of the mitten during a particularly wet summer, where the only respite from the thick air was a morning breeze followed by a mid-afternoon thunderstorm.
Going from living in high-density urban sprawl to the stillness of the country ex-urbs has provided the shock my system desperately needed. I’d like to pretend I’m brave, actually doing what so many living in that same urban sprawl love to say they wish to do, waxing commune but never making a step towards it other than in a highly curated Zillow feed. But the moving itself is not an act of bravery. No, bravery is recognizing the farce and the folly that claims leaving is an act of failure without acknowledging all that fails me by staying. It’s cutting the lines that tether me to the confused, flat part of myself that cannot tell the difference between my dreams and my demons, who is tired of living the double life of the carefully selected image and the one I have to face in the mirror, alone.
There’s an old adage that approximately says that the things we love the most hold the potential to do us the most harm. Well, Los Angeles, I must love you to the depths of the Pacific and back. But everything I love about you must stay neatly tucked away for now. I’m not ready to go back, not yet, not even in my mind. Here, my mistakes and heartaches don’t lurk around every corner.
Only time will tell whether I feel as comfortable on snow-covered dirt roads as I am gliding across 5 lanes of traffic to merge onto another freeway without touching the brakes a la Maria Wyeth. But for now, I’ll settle in like the birds living in my chimney.
