The past few years I have lived here without a car. Lived is maybe two weeks every three months and here is Los Angeles. Each time I return with a stronger anxiety that with my parents now well into their sixties, things will soon cease to be as they have been. And each time my parents whip me out of the LAX tunnels, I am filled with giddy relief that the sky is as blue as they say it is and that we have again been spared from irreparable change. 

My living here without a car is due to my proneness to vehicular mishaps (parallel parking in West Hollywood, misalignment on Ventura Boulevard, my pervasive lack of understanding of how wide I am and what planes I invade, a deficiency that I notice also when I wear a puffer or anything that extends my radius three inches in either direction) and my parents’ subsequent duty to KEEP AIKO OFF THE ROADS.

This shameful incompetence crafted my relationship with Los Angeles: a constant churning to love it as my friends who drove cinematically on Mulholland Drive did, as I instead went on half assed runs through Santa Monica Canyon and onto the strand on the beach which ran parallel to the Pacific Coast Highway. Where the strand met Temescal Canyon Road was the three mile mark from my home and where my dog got water. Up Temescal is Pali High where I once ran to meet my friend who bought a swimsuit for me that my parents would have never let me buy. And further up is the park where many had their first kiss in the back of a Subaru. And then on Sunset past the supermarket is Pearl Dragon, our favorite Asian-Fusion restaurant that doused everything in soy sauce. I name these not just to press a blasée sentimentality but rather in hope to show you how within a matter of two miles, the sand tracks into the grass-coated carmel ground of Temescal and lays down under the dark green brush, giving way to this baby blue school built into the Santa Monica Mountains and the lives that surround it. 

There is a specific image I think of with the Palisades. Overlooking the ocean, there is a street named Via De Las Olas which traces along the edge of the bluff where many of the residential streets meet. We would park the car along that street and eat our froyo there, with the impossibly beautiful sky and sun and sea and sand just outside the window that my friend’s naked feet dangled out of.  

This, the sun setting and seeing from one window nearly a kaleidoscope of water and trees and mountain light, perhaps contextualizes the Palisades Village, the pompously quaint shopping village we sat down the street from. With a white stucco Erewhon and Reformation it in fact looked a little bit like a pastel pedicure on a toy poodle in building form, and it housed a cafe to which my parents had an obsessive attachment. Every Sunday, my dad would elephant-walk through the village to the outdoor patio, ever-so-slightly barricaded by a foot high hedge, and bellow, “Good morning Mr. Verhoeven!” Mr. Verhoeven, Dutch and not really into all that, would still stop reading the paper or a script, and with beady, playful eyes, talk with my dad about whatever project he was working on. My dad, in turn, would always listen with a pleased grin that pushed his cheeks up to his terminator-like sunglasses and shoot him a genuine thumbs up, so proud and amused to have such a casual relation in the industry. 

If the sun was out and not too bright, my dad would snag the outside table next to the Verhoeven’s. He would take the seat facing the sun so my mom could have her back warmed while they drank their double shot lattes and caught up with the waiters as if we all lived on the same block, meeting on the curb for coffee. 

Perhaps it is the ecosystem of LA in which the people who worked there often drove in from places far from the Palisades that complicates my sense of loss following this destruction that has been compared by locals to sights after war. For a second, as with all headlines that are only headlines and not catalysts for packing a life in a bag or calling loved ones who are doing just that, this is another issue of the other, maybe of a friend or a classmate or a roommate of a girlfriend but nothing more than a text and surge of feeling and unity. But perhaps it is with the acronym of LA and the Hollywood sign and the confusion of fires so close to the water that this becomes not only the issue of the other, but the other who sits above in the bluffs, in the hills, comfortably above sea level, whose burning warrants titles such as Palisades Lost. From the aerial view one cannot help but fixate not just on what is lost but the stark color contrast between what once was and what is left.

The Greats (Didion, Steinbeck, the few on my sparse bookshelf) have concluded that a frequent symptom of California is optimism: a dogged optimism that underlies whatever Angelenos delude themselves of because there is a lot. There is an air of jargon-encased impossibility here, inhaled every day, wildfire or not, in the industry (as my dad was once asked in the Palisades Village: “are you in the industry?”) or not. 

This optimism permeates in the Palisades as it permeates in the morning commute across the city. It is the impossibility of coming down the 405 before merging onto the 101 and seeing the road blending into the snow topped mountains as the draft clears and the sun comes up and yet 25 minutes ago sitting in infuriating traffic alongside the Pacific Ocean bumper to bumper wishing please don’t rear end me, or in my case, please for the love of god don’t rear end or side end or any end anyone. It is also the impossibility of having a house in the Pacific Palisades, each lush front yard evidence of dreams realized, success neither fairly distributed nor fairly destroyed. 

The biggest delusion I believe us to be under is that Los Angeles is a city. I would like it to be known that it isn’t, at least not a working one; it is utterly unwalkable and the public transportation system is flawed and, on that basis, it has failed at my two main criteria of city-ness. That, and the fact that in my dad’s eyes it looks like one big strip mall and now I cannot help but see it as well. Perhaps this very delusion is the breeding ground for such ingratiating optimism, of having, more or less, all of it–the mountains, the ocean, the optimism, the cynicism. Because even if the Santa Anas are blowing and it hasn’t rained in months, we find ourselves shocked, perhaps with a hubris that is not limited to Los Angeles, that we were not protected by everything we had.

I have been throwing around the royal we like it’s nobody’s business when I can hardly speak for myself. So let me return to my atma/root chakra upon which I would center myself every so often at the Santa Monica Corepower to say that each time I return to LA, with the lack of car and childhood bedroom and knowing eyes of parents and even my friends, I feel, with guilt, a deep sense of entrapment into a two mile radius and consequently an entrapment into myself. The two-mile radius has been perhaps the most idyllic patch of land I will find myself calling home. Yet such is the disadvantage of the place in which I’ve grown up, which harbors, however unfairly, the joy and sadness and embarrassment of having grown up. It is impossible for me to write, or even see Los Angeles without this veneer for now, just as I conceitedly believe that it is impossible for anyone to love Los Angeles without having lived there. 

Los Angeles, though to a lesser extent than James Baldwin attributes to Paris, easily becomes a city that is simply imagined. The movies and smoothies don’t help. But to love it from soot to soil is an entirely different thing altogether. I don’t know what it means to build a life in Los Angeles or to build a life at all; what I know is the air in the Palisades as the sky sinks into the tall dark trees that soar above houses and the food sits somewhere in our stomach and we walk, aimlessly, to the beach or the Village or home. It is all of these expensive adjectives–romantic, fallen, illusory–and yet it is undeniably real, a serenity that is not hoped for, but already achieved. 

Optimism is not antithetical to change but in terms of things ceasing to be as they have been–which, at twenty, still presents itself as a most terrifying reality–I do believe the air in the Palisades as I’ve known it will change. Whether it is growing up, growing old, or these fires, I cannot help but shake the feeling that I must impose upon myself an evolution to love “home” not only despite, but for its fickleness, its arid, impossible views and dreams that really were a little bit impossible. To love Los Angeles, I think, should catapult us into a little bit of shame, because it is a subversion of values both proper and sensible. It is a love of views and things at once incredibly superficial and equally meaningful, an open declaration to a life that no matter how well you prepare for, lends itself more to aesthetics than practicality.  

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