when lovely and i moved to LA last february, we gave ourselves a year and some change. lovely grew up here, and there’s something about settling down in the place where you’re from that doesn’t vibe with the culture of ceilingless upward mobility that so many of us have been raised to aspire for. probably the same reason i could never see myself in the bay again. “i wouldn’t even be able to afford to move back!” is typically my response – a convenient truth but not actually the reason.
i remember when i was going to put the une on the map (the une is what we called union city, a suburb that i often even need to point out to fellow californians as one of the exits that blur by when driving the 880 from oakland to san jose). “it’s where they opened one of the first jollibees in the bay,” i sometimes offer, often to just further confusion. sometimes i resort to identifying the une by referring to our neighboring towns. my go-to used to be hayward, “next to where the rock grew up!” these days, its easier to just say it’s near the tesla plant in fremont. but that’s neither here nor there.
if our time in LA was just meant to be a year and some change, tbh i don’t even know if the counting has even begun. it was a year, but was there some change? we made our last big target run just a week before the lockdown – a hybrid of nesting and hunkering down. just yesterday, we finally braved the outside world to buy new furniture – an antique chair with an elaborate wood carving and mustard velvet upholstery. we’re calling it our zoom throne – recognizing that this may be a vote of no confidence to assurances that we’ll be back to the old normal by the fourth of july. not depending on it.
not counting this first year in LA does a disservice to the city as a landscape. the fact of the matter is that i’ve spent more mornings at the beach than not, have hiked malibu state park so regularly that i recognize each tree, and have learned to navigate from venice to DTLA without the guardrails of waze. i have planted trees and watched cacti shrivel, been confounded by why some of my succulents discolor in the sun, and can recognize exactly at which hour my yard patio gets engulfed by the shade and drops the temperature ten degrees.
to say our time in LA hasn’t started yet is to claim that all of the sand, ocean, greenery, and groundedness that defined my past twelve months were only consolations for not being able to hit the club. okay that’s not fair – not just the club, but the theme parks, the concerts, the sun-coated brunches on january patios, the bbqs and kick-its, the joints passed with the countless people i know here whom i may not have seen anyway, regardless of the pandemic, but which we amicably allow to be the explanation – a convenient truth but not actually the reason.
last month, my brother commiserated over how nothing happened for the past year. he turned 30 last february – he anticipated a brave new world, but instead he got the same old thing. none of us might truly understand all the change, growth, and transformation that this past year of lockdown brought us until we actually go back out into the world. i imagine that many of the public spaces that i used to flow through with such ease will feel jagged, awkward, suffocating, compelling me to escape to the isolation and boredom i’ve learned to embrace. some of the familiar faces that have been missing from my life will feel like a breath of fresh air, other reconnections may be greeted with new incongruences, proving that so much has indeed changed.
what i do know is that i’ve lived the shit out of LA this past year – it may have been filled with emotional rollercoasters rather than actual ones, more nights with netflix than hollywood encounters, time passing on my couch rather than cars in traffic. it was an LA that only i know, and only could’ve known this past year. it was a year at home.