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Los Angeles is rehab. Each time I return, I am its sedated prisoner. I cycle through matching pajama sets. I shrug off an ill-fitting teal pair to get dressed for the day in sweatpants. When I get cold—an inevitable fate in the seaside house of my childhood—I wrap myself in a knitted Brandy Melville sweater with a broken button. Like a tomb in here, says my mother, as I turn the thermostat dial to 72.
I read books with the TV on. I am sated with portion-controlled desert bounties—fruit for breakfast, vegetables for lunch, fish for dinner. I swallow vitamins promising better memory and a longer life, with heavy sips from Mason jars of room-temperature filtered water. Please come to New York before you commit to juicing, to jogging, to calling poison fog, and drinking stolen water and paying for it.1
Visitors are limited. Once or twice, I get behind the wheel to meet someone for one glass. It didn’t take much to mildly destroy a Prius two years ago, turning into the parking lot at the Red Lion in Silver Lake. This affair wrecked my insurance rates, pristine driving record, and nerves. In LA, nothing is better than staying home.
In my bedroom, I light a lamp shaped like a pillar of salt, reminding me to never look back. I go to bed at 10:00, too exhausted to manifest or masturbate. My dream world is more beguiling than my waking hours. In the morning, I stick my face in the sunshine, having read somewhere that this is good for your circadian rhythms.
I am at once, supremely wrapped up with and utterly inattentive to my appearance. My hair hangs in limp, frizzy locks. I pin aside my unstyled bangs. My makeup lies cold in a bag and I remove my manicure with the notion of letting my nails breathe. I leave my jewelry in a dish. I look at my unadorned self, trying to determine whether I come across as a very tired seventeen-year-old or as a woman with a full job and life, older than her parents on their wedding day. Superficially, my greatest fear is discovering a hair on the mole on my neck. Deeper, I am looking for evidence that one day I’ll die like everyone else.
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For once, I have an excuse to repose all day like a Victorian invalid. Two weeks ago, I tripped descending the stairs to the First Avenue L train. My memory of the scene is staccato from the sudden rush of pain and fear. Catching myself with my wrist. My right shin flush against the metal steps, as though I was kneeling. Glancing down to see my right ankle turned three-quarters clockwise in a thermal sock and lug sole Mary Jane. A stranger helped me limp to the bottom of the staircase, where I sat for a few minutes trying not to faint. Grounded, I called Evana. Change of plans.
That night, we drank wine and ate noodles, while I elevated my legs on couch cushions, with a bag of frozen peas ribbon-tied to my ankle. Within an hour, I got a call from my mother that my childhood dog needed to die. George. A stiff-legged googly-eyed Havanese, with a fabulous fan of a tail and terrible, terrible breath. He was a few weeks short of his 16th birthday, which meant that his sudden turn for the worse wasn’t a particular surprise. Still, he was family and I was heartbroken. He was just a dog. Now his body’s gone. So what is left but me and my poem?2
Sprained ankles and dead dogs. Minor league problems until they happen to you.
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I made it through my last weeks of work for the year, my last weeks of New York, and hobbled west. And if life seems absurd, what you need is some laughter. And a season to sleep, and a place to get clean. Maybe Los Angeles. Somewhere no one’s expecting.3
Once, I worked with one of the Real Housewives of New York. We got to talking about our impressions of LA, and I gave her my classic spiel. It was a nice place to grow up, but it’s not for me. It’s not as fake as everyone says. Really, it’s just intensely suburban. What I don’t love is how everything is so separate and controlled. People go from their houses to their cars to their destination to their cars to their houses. There’s little room for serendipity. But, it’s beautiful, I offered feebly. She snorted and said: LA is not beautiful. I thought about all the ugly stucco strip malls and dusty tree pits and gray freeways cutting through the land. But, the beach… The weather… My wishy-washiness hung in the air. We both knew this kind of beauty wasn’t enough for people like us.
I don’t hate Los Angeles, nor do I even feel a true aversion. It is my motherland, but I’m allergic to it. My tongue is itchy, my throat tight. I walk around with half-used tissues in my pockets. People used to think I was always sick. In truth, something in the air just doesn’t agree with me. No cocktail of Singulair, Zyrtec, Allegra-D, Flonase, or Neti Pots could ever clear me out.
In the same vein, I’ve always felt a certain placelessness while I’m here. Where are you from? I am asked at the bagel chain where my brother worked in high school. I become more mutable when I’m here. I float along. I am liked, even loved, but I lack brilliance. A flame needs air to shine.
Still, there is healing to be found in such a neutral, dreamlike desert. To me, it’s neither depressing nor inspiring. It’s a promise of a reset. A detox from my life as a world-famous burnt-out flâneur dilettante on the other coast.
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Once we stop growing upwards, we must either grow outwards or accept our steady slouch towards the grave. This year, my travels added up to two circles around the globe. I spent more than 100 days away from the place I live. I learned to love and be loved for one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind.4 I made new friends in foreign cities, where we developed photographic evidence that what we had was real. I was advised to accept love the way we accept that water has no taste.
I retired from writing, as a joke, but not entirely. I soaked up the deliciousness of shrugging off a persona I’ve crafted for years on Substack, and much longer before that. I switched my Instagram subheading from Writer to Dog Day Care Center. I posted a carousel of all the times in the last year I smiled bigger than my vanity. I’ve never been good at taking myself too seriously.
Somebody told me that this is the hardest age to live through. When they were my age, they felt adrift. This is a sad truth. But not every sad truth is prophetic. I don’t think my destiny is to be unmoored in the same way. I don’t have a plan but I am not lost at sea. I am walking at sunset, stiffly, slowly, but what a thrill it is to walk again. I spot a ship on the foggy horizon, but I am not on it. My recovering feet are here on the ground.
I’ll never be finished. I suspect I’m not even halfway there. I can’t stop. I gotta eat the whole thing.5 Here I am, perpetually birdwatching, stargazing, cloudchasing at the cliff’s edge. My next step will always lead to a certain fall. But isn’t there energy in watercolor bruises and arriving somewhere new?
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🫖 After my announcement in November, you might be wondering: what does this essay mean for the future of Insecure Tea? And to that, I say: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Distancing from my grip on the ‘writer’ identity has been beneficial to me lately. I’ve gotten a lot of kind words about how people will miss this project, and also a lot of support in my choice to take a potentially permanent break. Whether this is a conclusion, a halfway point, or a new beginning, I thank you for being here through my ambivalence. You can listen to the music archive here, and read my other essays on the site. Happy New Year! I love you. 🫖
“Eyeballs,” A. Savage
“Sad 2,” Frankie Cosmos
“Cleanse Song,” Bright Eyes
“One Too Many Mornings,” Bob Dylan
“A Star Is Born,” Jerskin Fendrix