Leaving New Zealand wasn’t real for me until the weight of all the little mundane every day things I had become accustomed to caught up. So I didn’t really believe it, despite every telling me how excited I must be.
Are you excited yet?
It hit me walking home from work, for the last time, and on the way home a boy in a bright yellow singlet cleaning a car, his blond hair shaken like a mop as he leant over the bumper, the smell of water from the loose hose on the footpath mingling with the distant smell of winter fireplaces burning, the air all grey blue from the cold and the sinking sun and the street lights, just beginning to come on, shivering, and turning the sky around them purple. That sad and beautiful and impossibly lonely suburban life i’ve always lived just brimming with quiet moments like that, all about to change.
Are you excited yet?
My life here hit me in the mundane too. In walking to the supermarket, in buying cheese, in buying cheap mangoes and berries (and then expensive meat and everything else), in walking to Echo Park Lake to meet new friends, in learning to look left for cars, in Gonzo’s similarities to someone I know but couldn’t put a finger on, in his temperament, (it was Archit, I realised later, in a small smark of knowing, it’s something in the smile on his voice), in Ruta’s tan lines made wonky by her skewed dress, in the sun, bright and hard and always watching. Ruta has an old soul. I think it shows in the way her eyes bunch at the edges when she smiles. I think she’s spent a lot of her life laughing, its infectious and we all smile more. I think a person seems like they’ve lived a lot when their happiness gets inside you like liquid.
Echo Park made LA make sense. It was the place we all hoped we would find here. Dense and leafy and eclectic with its bundled houses and smaller roads, it was like breathing again after holding on for too long. There was a farmers market where we bought these big bulging strawberries so we could really believe we were in summer and we took them to the Elysian Park which was steep and dry and sliced right open by a highway. Ash did yoga while we read books and sucked all the juice out of our strawberries and Ruta speculated on why the weirdos always target her. I told her they do the same to me and she said we must never travel alone together, it will be double-strength weirdo attraction.
Some Americans pulled over on the road with a window down to ask if we were tourists. I wonder what gave it away. Was is our relaxed look? The fact that we were actually walking in LA? I wondered if she won a bet with the question. There was no follow up. She just kind of rolled her head back in the window like she already knew.
Are you excited yet?
The footpath mysteriously vanished on our walk out of the park. We walked past this old hospital, sticking close, grazing ankles on the kerb side. It was a respiratory hospital on the edge of LA’s oldest park and apparently people used to check themselves in to escape the smog, to breathe again. It was white and library quiet in the sun.
Apparently LA invented the themed neighbourhood, so it seemed just right that Chinatown unfolded before us like some kind of boardgame, like we’d opened a book and all its cardboard little shop fronts and street lamps and archways all opened out with it and spilled all over the place in a kind of wonderful red and yellow chaos. I guess I wonder about this world of copies, the intentional mixing of things not quite right, China in the LA heat, China with wide dry roads and Spanish street names, China with American accents, China all packaged up and shipped 10000km (or maybe that famous hole was dug, all the way through), to take little bits of it and call them your own.
Are you excited yet?
