on our way home
This city is not for me, this city with its wide hot broken roads and fast drivers, with its pastel stucco houses perched on brown hillsides and its thick gritty air. This city blows out in all directions like some cinema apocalypse; it is sprawling and hidden at once with a million unmapped rooms like a world in a video game.Julien left me here on the misleadingly named Vermont Street while she runs errands, left me between the grungy Taco Mucho and the adult video store and the probiotic yogurt place, and at once I felt lost, felt all Girl in the Big City as if I’d never lived in New York, felt the long slow stares as I walked past all the people sitting in the heat. They look angry, and they look like they’re waiting for something that’s been a long time coming. Rain, probably. I hope it rains this year, said Julie this morning.
This city fills my head with movies, which I guess is not surprising. LA Story and Swingers and Crash and Pretty Woman, and the people all strike me as actors, styled and studied and empty. I look at them one by one, and at the storefronts and the skyline, and wonder if anything here at all is real besides me.
I found an art store and spent ten minutes picking a pen. Relishing the familiar. Sepia Prismacolor, .005, and a slim black notebook to write in. I’m hiding on a bench in the vestibule of a boutique with creepy window displays, paper mache children with balloon heads suspended by wire. I don’t know what they sell here. I don’t want any.
I am trying out watching, instead of being watched. I’m hoping LA won’t look at me - I don’t want to start feeling that I have something to prove. I want to dry out and get tan and smell eucalyptus, and leave unnoticed.
posted by tortaluga @ 12:34 PM
1 Comments:
LA!?!?!
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