This summer I have the gift of time, precious time that I rarely have all to myself when I teach. The goal is to finish a chapter and prepare for the job market. This is time I spend with myself, albeit often in crowded cafes, alone in my own head thinking and mapping and remapping links between information stored and gained, deciphering the puzzles presented by texts and wondering if ever there is a bottom to what seems like this well of infinite crossings and meanderings created by words. A hundred times a day I want to hit that bottom, so that finally, I can rest, and yet about the same number of times, I decide that doing so would mark the beginning of the end. Then it wouldn't be any kind of rest or reprieve, just an end. Mundane and common place. And who wants that? So I let my mind wonder and wander down networks of roads and tunnels.
I often ask myself: have I gone crazy? Maybe just a little, but not all the way. Otherwise I would not be able to question my sanity. I would, you know, just be crazy. I often feel off kilter, sitting there an island onto myself, in that Highland Park cafe, itself an island, amidst the sea of brown people. I wax nostalgic about the good ol' days before cafe culture invaded this neighborhood, when I first came to live in this city, and yet there I am, consuming Saint Latte, the patron saint of gentrification. I get angry, but with whom, I have yet to work out.
L.A. is confusing and infuriating in this way, more so than any other metropolitan city, I think. Here difference is magnified by its expansive landscape which spreads out like a cancer or, if you like something prettier, less offensive, like the ripple on a puddle made by a raindrop cascading down from the petals of a dewy sunflower. But then again, it rarely rains in L.A. so such moments of natural sublimity are few and far between. Better to write haikus about the white smoke slowly trailing from car exhausts or the permanent brown haze in the horizon.
I have lived in L.A. about as long as I've lived in San Francisco and Manila. My life divided in thirds marked by moving across and then along the Pacific. Back and forth. Always present is this ocean, though depending where one stands, the Pacific changes colors and temperatures from blue to green to gray to black and from warm to fucking freezing. If I forget where I am, all I need is to look towards the sea, dip a toe in the water and immediately I remember. Sometimes you need that, you know? A marker, place holder, palatandaan, a landmark telling us that or we are there rather than here or vice versa because otherwise, we'd be lost, floating signifiers, meaningless signs, unanchored ships drifting to elsewhere spaces. We lose ourselves this way. This is why I keep a GPS in my car; I have been known to lose myself in this city.
Perhaps I have been feeling dangerously untethered these days and being back here, in my first L.A. neighborhood has magnified that feeling, ironic as I try to make a home here, coming, as they say, in full-circle. But as my comings and goings have taught me, change remains the only certainty and even the familiar places we visit time and again quietly change as they take on the patina of our joys and troubles, of our tears and shame, of our laughter and regret. Until one day, we look up and see that the pictures of people and places emblazoned in the vaults of our minds look quite different in the light of day. And in the summertime, the light of day in this city can be quite harsh.
As I lose myself in my daydreams and in the mazes of words that the writing (and reading) process creates, I will try to make some small efforts to keep things the same so that I may preserve some semblance of sanity. This summer I will keep my toes painted and keep my hair long. No impulse hair cuts even when the heat and humidity make a disheveled mop out of my head. I will continue to wear bangs covering my forehead, skimming my eyelids, though sometimes they make it hard for me to blink away the the afternoon sunlight. I will wear my hair in a bun until it dries and when undone, long black waves will cascade down my back, mimicking the undulations of my heartbeat made irregular by the strong coffee I sip even in warm mornings. The Pacific too ebbs and flows, like the waves in my hair, as it crashes onto the tawny shoreline of this side of the world. Here, the skyline is also brown, shrouding downtown buildings with the thick and languid residue of modernity. This summer I will drive away and towards those buildings, and while to me they will always look a little creepy behind all that smog---like unmoving sentinels of cement and iron presiding over the city---in my comings and goings, they too will somehow become familiar enough as landmarks: the eastern equivalent to the ocean in the west.
As I try to keep some things for myself a sanctity through its sameness, it is my hope that I can perhaps, once again, though not in the same way, call this city unfamiliar home.
