Sunburn

Things I have and do not have in Los Angeles

When I’m in Los Angeles the days stretch out slow, long. I’m not sure I have any shadows to compare it to. The sun seems high until it is gone, down past the Santa Monica Mountains and casting vivid, tropical colors over Sunset Boulevard. Today my face is burnt. The ridge along my hairline where I applied my sunscreen twice. Visible from my room is a Paramount lot. A Netflix building. The Broadway Hollywood, and the Hollywood Athletic Club where I work in a literary office. Around the corner is the Desert Five Spot, a bar where the only time I’ve been almost everyone I encountered was too drunk and too unpleasant. I have a working list of the nightlife. I have a working list of jobs in LA, Colorado, and Wyoming. I have one boy I flirt with at parties, he wears a sweet smile and business loafers. I have an ex who flirts with me, embracing a new-found forwardness which causes him to pass me a cigarette by holding it to my lips, or slip me a twenty for a tequila sunrise by placing it down the front pocket of my jeans. I have a boy at home who wants me to stay home, who treats me like a girlfriend and makes me wince, which is funny because there was a not-so-distant time when that was all I wanted.

I have healthy habits. I have frozen dino nuggets. I have a nicotine addiction I will not admit to and a thing of Tito’s in my cupboard. I have not been writing. I have been reading for work and seldom for pleasure. Work is pleasurable, however. Especially when there are chocolate-covered almonds on the desk. Los Angeles used to scare me. I thought it was a vengeful place of Spanish architecture and secret societies. Of losing your dreams and selling your soul. I have not been here long enough to experience such things. I suppose you need be a certain level of important to get swept up in the image I’ve created. A week before I came here I sat, tired, with friends at Mystic Pizza. Tense with each other from the drive we sat silent, watching the TV, and fire tore through the mountains. Tall and orange and merciless. I saw an orthodontist and after he told me my teeth made my profile convex he offered, “Everyone’s leaving Los Angeles. Why would you want to go there?”

Last Saturday we piled six into an Uber and rode twenty-five minutes to Santa Monica. We went to a bar that looked and felt like a frat house, we all lost each other only to find ourselves together again, outside, and headed toward the shore. I walked down the beach, my jeans rolled as high as they could before constricting above the knee. I stood with my calves in the ocean and hands on my hips and looked out. Out at an ocean I am not used to. One where mountains lay flat against the sky, sloping down to the sea like a sound stage, palm trees lining the street. The Ferris wheel was still lit, which surprised me for whatever hour it was, one maybe two a.m.. A boy made a remark, something jovial, but provokingly unkind about the way I stood, looking. I don’t know what he said, I made the effort of ignoring it. I made my way back to the shore and took off my pants, let my belongings fall recklessly from the pockets. Phone, cards, keys. Then, Jake’s pants were off too, and I no longer cared about the way my ass looked, my cotton underwear that was likely four years old, or the hazard warning that filled the coast, debris left by fire. Instead, we ran into the water, whooping and splashing and accompanied by no one else. We shared a wet hug and trudged up to the shore. I didn’t care about the grit of my wet pants when I put them on, or when I put them on again, wetter and grittier after everyone else decided they wanted to be wild too. Eight drunken twenty year olds, soaked and sandy in our underwear. The kind of thing your parents tell you about and you remember uneasily that they were kids once too.

That Monday the bulletin boards in the laundry room changed from spring break beaches to post-grad resources. Bummer. That Monday we started talking about who’s living where. I decided I will stay here. I am excited and frightened by what it will be like then. Who I will see. Who I will lose. The boys from the fall in Boston and the prospect I may never see them again, our friendships brief and meaningful, to me at least. This is not Boston. It’s not Providence or Fall River or Fogland Beach. It’s 3000 miles away and 3 hours behind. It is the same world I share with my mother. With Audrey and the East Coast. It is hot and dry. Promises and disappointments waiting in sun-baked corners. It’s a sunset pig. It’s the sprawling flatness of a valley. It’s ablaze when you least expect it.