Living In Los Angeles...
“I know what you mean,” she says. “I lived in New York City for such a long time and when I go back I miss it more intensely than when I’m here thinking about it. That’s the way life is.”
“I just find myself crying randomly at stop lights or while on a run at how absolutely comfortable I feel, at how many memories come washing back over me, about how much of my life happened here.” I say, “It still feels like home. I remember all the shortcuts, I’ve randomly run into people at half the places I go.”
“All of that doesn’t go away because you’ve moved away. Who knows? You’ll always have friends and professional relationships and ties here. You’ll always have a reason to visit. Life might bring you back here, you just never know and the amazing thing about you is that you know that. You allow yourself to stay open to the experience.”
The wisdom of friends…
Walking along the bluffs of Palisades Park in Santa Monica overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the breeze and the sun mixing together like sand and suntan lotion on a summer day, my heart feels just about to burst as I talk with one of my closest friends who I’ve missed so terribly since I left LA in December, 2008.
Everything about Los Angeles comes flooding back to me. When I first arrived in the fall of 2003, October 16th to be exact, I was in love and felt like LA was this place where opportunity grew on trees and you could make your own path and create your own existence. I felt like anything was possible and moving into a one bedroom apartment two blocks from the beach in Venice, my (then) boyfriend and I were struggling to figure out what to do with our lives, what our mission was. We both felt like we had a greater calling, something spectacular beckoning us, we just weren’t sure what it was.
After my five exceptional years in Los Angeles, I still felt that way. That hope and excitement for the future. I created a full, rich and deep life. Not just the friends that crossed my path, or the rocks I overturned discovering and defining a city on my own terms but in my understanding of who I was in a city that would just as likely chew you up and spit you out as it would embrace you and call your name. It’s not an easy place to live, LA challenges you. The traffic alone is enough to send some people running back to where they came from.
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