They ask me when I am going to come back for good. “Your triumphant return to Los Angeles,” they call it. I spew off something about my mom and my family and this being my home, but I’m not sure it feels like home anymore.
I drive through Beverly Hills, the sidewalks burning from the rays of an unseasonably furious sun. Women who aren’t mothers push strollers next to dying Bermuda grass. I turn up the AC in my bubble and listen to music that seemed to have more meaning when playing through my headphones four days ago while I walked down a street somewhere in Brooklyn.
The houses turn into smaller bungalows, modest homes that still cost nearly a million dollars to own and have bedrooms the size of large closets. These are the “charming” homes that are the product of undergraduate degrees from Berkeley and diplomas from Stanford Law – that, or dumb luck. Trees provide shade, but it is still hot when I park my car, the sweat providing a binding agent between my skin and my T-shirt.
My friends are waiting for me at a restaurant where the servers know my name and that I like my coffee with soy milk, preemptively offering me a box full of the stuff with the lid snapped up and ready to be poured. I order chili-poached eggs for the second time in three days because they don’t have it anywhere else. My friends and I laugh about people we know and talk about movies we love and hate. We pay, we hug, and all get in our own cars, driving in directions not more than a mile apart from one another. I flip through another playlist of music compulsively and indecisively. I can rarely make up my mind.
Ten more hours to go. I pack up my things in a room nearly ninety degrees. The fucking heat, I think, this dry fucking California heat. Just a month ago I was complaining about the ungodly humidity I was subjecting myself to across the country, falling asleep in front of an air conditioning unit and nearly choking on my own hot breath. I don’t recall being this hard to please as a child. My past social grievances are muddied by smiles seen in photographs with fading blue skies and hair that used to be much, much blonder.
My bags are packed with the odds and ends of three days: A boy’s cashmere sweater, trail mix from Trader Joe’s, dirty socks. I’m bringing back shirts I took to the dry cleaners on Fairfax two months ago; I don’t yet trust anyone in New York with my clothes so I wait a few months until I can have the pieces back again. I’m doing the same thing with my hair color and my coffee beans and my friends, and I wonder how much I am not giving to my new life. I have jumped off of a very tall building and landed on a cushioned balcony two floors down.
Let it fall.
I’m in a car again, this time heading to my mom’s house but without any laundry to do. The drive is long and I listen to more songs, unsatisfied still. Flip, flip, flip. The car’s thermometer reads One Hundred Billion Degrees and I am not surprised. My thighs stick to the gray leather interior like they did back in high school, the heat turning them a glistening flush.
The apartments adjacent to the blurry road are horrid, square testaments to a life I have no concept of – covered in cheap stucco, like ratty and pilled sweaters Filled with aspiring actors and people working to build someone else’s big dreams without the time or energy to work on their own. Big city living.
Off of the freeway, the streets are the same dry stretches of suburbia I grew up on, only now filled with more commercial property and nicer fast food restaurants. This used to be brush-covered hillside, and while it wasn’t necessarily the most beautiful expanse of landscape, it was comfortable.
The trees wither and I have turned the music down to a murmur. The glass windows are going to melt around me, like my life here. It’s a chemical reaction I have no control over, waiting on an incombustible fate and a redeye flight back to New York City.
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Fantastic. ANd I love the title. I remember mine, and how glorious it was.