Ghosts of Los Angeles
Los Angeles swims in and out of my consciousness all day long. It’s like memories, if memories were breathing beings. A flash of an image here, a familiar scent there, a chunk of a map coming into view. They’re all here all the time and they’re as fresh as if they had occurred yesterday instead of 7+ years ago. Sometimes they’re welcome, like greeting an old friend, and sometimes it’s like I’m being haunted by an old ex.
Los Angeles is a place where every stereotype is true, and every stereotype is defied on a daily basis. Sometimes it really does just feel like an idea rather than a place, especially for someone born there who’s left and hasn’t been back in a few years. Los Angeles is a collective dream that continues building and deconstructing itself whether you’re there to witness it or not. Like in the film Inception, we are building this dream together and most of us are unaware we are dreaming until we arrive. The relationship between the observer and the observed is contained there, almost like the layers of smog only exist to block out a bird’s eye view. All are welcome here, but only if you agree to get on the ground with us and build this dream together.
The vastness can start to give you a feeling of being in different kingdoms, co-existing, each with its own rules and rhythm. Perhaps this is the way we fancy ourselves: kings and queens and jesters and royal whores of a kingdom, our kingdom, a tiny piece of the collective dreamscape.
Memories pluck themselves out of the mundane, silent parts of my day and tap on my shoulder like the road stretching out behind you in the rear view. Though they may be in the past, they assert themselves as part of the present when I allow them to. Random bits of the map, different people I’ve been depending on the year and the location, all layering on top of each other like sheets of paper, pop into my brain and astonish me with their familiarity, their clarity in my memory despite being years removed. Just like Los Angeles is a place that’s not a place but rather an idea we’ve all agreed upon, these memories are places removed from time, suspended in my subconscious. They have no regard for the difference between 2015 and 2022. But I do. And I concern myself with these things because they concern themselves with me.
I don’t know why I can’t get Los Angeles out of my head and I don’t know if anybody else feels the same way I do. Is anyone else haunted by maps, tortured by timepieces that remind you of points in the fabric that are constantly becoming further and further removed from your present reality? Am I the only one who is plagued by an urge to turn the car around and investigate the roads already traveled, the paths that won’t get themselves out of my field of vision? Am I the only one who feels exiled from the place that made them?
Los Angeles haunts me on a persistent schedule. Dead versions of myself and that city constantly claw their way through the ground and break through into my peaceful moments. A deep breath, I’m washing dishes on my feet but really I’m in a car on a road in the night and I know exactly which memory I’ve slipped into, which endless freeway I’m suddenly traversing, whether I was in pursuit or seeking escape, where I am on the map, which drugs were in my purse. I don’t intend to return to these moments, these places that only exist in conjunction with expired time. But they seem intent on returning to me whenever they can.
