To Los Angeles: A Love Letter

Growing up, you were always that glorified entity I sought to explore every damn inch of. That which attracted to itself the most beautiful, trying souls—like the voices of sirens, minus the doom, right? I wanted to be part of your world.

I grew up. I came to see your blatant, concentrated disposition of countless backgrounds, privileges, narratives in one stacked concrete spill. Things were what they were and nothing else, unambiguous. No fortified enclave or judgements of pretentious suburbia that echoed as home. But you weren’t all surfaces and revelations; you were the ceaseless negotiation between your inhabitants disguising loneliness in a display of unrelenting intimacy, to pretending to be far less detached than they really were. An unrelenting conflict.

I grew up. I came to know you.

Besides your anonymity. Your nose was a peak never touched by the weather, your surface rough from all your years, with scars of alleyways dark and deep yet with light was always in sight. You and your certain charm. Blatancy, perhaps.

I grew up and learned you. Countless weekends. Late nights. That’s when you came alive. I found my own place among all of your territory: after so much seeking and transgressing countless levels, my own abode. A creaky place in you that others had undoubtedly claimed as their own, too. Everyone had etched, painted, affirmed their place in you—but you belonged no one.

Here I was again that night. A special night, an unplanned encounter. Something drew me back to that ledge, seven stories above the anonymity, beyond the peril, beyond it all.

Just watching you in your entirety. I had found my place, my space in the city.

Yet, to learn the city was to discover that this clarity, for miles on end, was all an illusion.

Despite it’s apparent nakedness, it was all a quicksand metropolis—at it’s late hour, seducing you, changing you, reclaiming you, again and again.

—By Aditi M., 19, California