On LA & Lana Del Ray
10.22.21
I open the window next to my desk and am immediately greeted by the rolling sound of mid-day traffic, not unlike the ocean waves that are breaking 15 miles to the west. The cars stop at a red light, I hear Lana Del Ray’s voice crooning over the whirr of the quasi-urban life that is LA — the incessant drone of traffic, dogs barking, car doors slamming, birds chirping. New York buzzes, LA hums. Lana’s new album was released not even 24 hours ago, and here I am, enjoying this private moment of first listen with some stranger who I now feel a vulnerable, honest connection with. I smile to myself as I remember the week Taylor Swift’s album ‘folklore’ came out - I was still in New York, it was that stage in the pandemic that we thought was mid-stage but actually ended up just being a longer addendum to the beginning (July 2020), we were beginning to slowly slowly dip our toes into the very surface of life again (going for longer walks outside, maybe masking up and seeing close friends & family, slowly relinquishing the fear that every human we met in the narrow pre-war building hallways was a potential deadly threat). I remember walking down the five flights of stairs from my apartment to the street and hearing songs from that album being played behind doors on multiple floors. Two roommates blasting ‘august’ and laughing, one of them loudly asking the other if she could borrow her flatiron, a softer hum of ‘cardigan’ seeping out from under the welcome mat in front of 202B. All of us privately listening, together. And now I think about how I don’t get the entire concept of LA, yet I’m finding my breath taken away at least once daily by the ever-present mountains looming in the distance, the breeze through the palms, the way the sunshine is warming every crack and crevice in my body and how my arm hairs stand on end when I cross to the shady side of the street. I think about how I thought I hated New York but really I just wanted it to love me back so badly, and as soon as it started loving me back, I left. I think about how that is the very order of things, really — not a mistake, or something to regret, or to turn over in my brain endlessly wondering whether I made the right decision or which one I like better. Rather, it’s something to rejoice — life, and how funny it all is, the constant motion, how New York and I love each other in seasons, and how Los Angeles already loves me with none. How LA is a paradox I may never understand and how that makes me want to keep trying to. How we never cease to find meaning, and if we can’t find it, to make it. And how this week I felt so lonely and lost that I thought I might want to just vanish into the dust under my couch, but then I opened my window and heard Lana Del Ray and smiled as the haunting melody drifted from a stranger’s stereo into my living room. How we aren’t strangers anymore, not really.