Love Note To Los Angeles #1

On Los Angeles and grief

I have been wanting to write. And I have not known how to write. What to write. This city. My love. This temperamental town. This end of the world. This last bus stop. This place where people dream and dream and dream. Our mountains so close to our sea. Our sea so close to our desert. We are one of the lucky ones. And there is grief in luck when so many have not been lucky. The years adding up from pandemic to war to tsunami to fire to flood to global catastrophe to famine. It is here. And here is immediate. And everyone knows not one but ten or fifteen or twenty or more people who lost everything. Which makes Los Angeles feel devastatingly small. I describe it to the strangers up north. The side I grew up on, got stoned on, kissed on, swam on, fell in love on, prayed on, dreamed of one day living is gone. The place I walked my daughter when we would visit my mom, walking by the house I wanted to buy, picture window to the sea. The houses in the canyon. Where my husband got me my perfume, handmade distilled in the backyard. The community of trailers below. All gone. And then the side we live on and love. Driving up into the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Where we would go for breakfast and coffee and hammers and nails. Thai food and the park. Where we hiked to see the snow in the mountains. Gone. Gone. Gone. It is too much. And what is too much and how much can the heart handle? Breaking again and again for all of us to become patchwork, for all of us to become stained glass.

Photograph by Ted Soqui along PCH during the Palisades Fire