It Never Rains in Southern California

So why am I thinking of leaving?

I have left many places and people in my life. 

Left willingly. Left begrudgingly. Left thoughtlessly. Left in protest. Left without looking back. 

I have left my country. Left my home. Left my family. Left friends. Boyfriends. Pets. Dorms. Apartments. 

I even left a husband. 

Looking back, it seems to me that that I exist in a constant state of leaving — a bittersweet prospect, if I’m being kind. But I have to be, because I know that I am not heartless or callous. Because I know that for every time I left something, I ran toward something else. Something new. 

I crave that newness with such intensity that it numbs the pain of losing that which I leave behind. It always has. Until recently, I thought it always would. 

Lately, that craving — the craving to leave — has made its way out of the dark corners of my entrails. Made its way through my skin and coated it, as if it is preparing me to shed my skin, snakelike, yet again. 

Slick, thick, hot, it weighs me down wherever I go.

“Leave,” it sings to me, when I hit traffic on the 101. And I turn up the music. 

“Leave,” it whispers, when the conversation lulls at a social gathering. And I pour myself another drink. 

“Leave,” it screams, as I scroll mindlessly through my matches on Hinge. And I force myself to reply back. 

I’m resisting it. I think I have been for years. I do not know why. 

Have I changed? Did I unknowingly transform from “the girl who leaves” to “the girl who stays”?

Or is it just that, this time, I know that losing what I stand to lose will hurt like nothing before has? 

That sounds right, and yet I wonder how that is even possible when, as mentioned, I have, in fact, left a husband. Could leaving Los Angeles actually hurt more than that? What would it say about me if it did?

No matter. To worry about what my feelings say about me would be useless. I can suppress, deny, or begrudge them, but change them? Nope. I can only try to understand them. 

So this is that: my attempt to understand what it is about this town, about my life here, that makes the prospect of leaving it so painful. I’ll start with the obvious.

The sun. Much has been said, written, and sung about it. “Fool’s gold,” some call it. Personally, I think the founders of Tinseltown did a kindness to us all when they chased the sun to California. And by “us” I mean anyone crazy or wounded enough to try their luck in Hollywood — actors, writers, directors, musicians. Without this endless supply of sun, the darkness would have long swallowed us up. It often still does. 

My friends. Living in Los Angeles can be crushingly lonely, even though this is a city 3.8 million people call home. Of all those people, nearly 40% of them are foreign-born. Of all these transplants, a good chunk are, like me, chasing a wild-goose of a dream. Hungry for validation, for vindication, for a chance at self-expression at the highest of levels, we come here because we have not fit in anywhere else. We come here feeling like big fish who left their too-small ponds, only to flounder in the massive depths of our stormy new waters. It can take a long time to catch your breath. But when you do — if you stick around long enough — you realize you’re not alone. There are others like you, so many of them, each of them enduring a storm of their own. Maybe one of them pulls you aboard a life boat. Or maybe you pull them. But eventually the boat is full and you’ve gone through something together — are still going through it — and suddenly, this lonely place isn’t so lonely anymore.

The dream. I cringe just typing that out, but I suspect the “ick” is due to how very real it is. To leave Los Angeles feels like I giving up on a dream that has defined me. Given me purpose. To be a writer in Southern California — like Joni and Joan and Stevie and Cass and Greta — to bear witness, to be a voice for the zeitgeist, it’s a dream so deeply etched into my mind and heart it seems permanent. And yet, it’s not the dream itself but its particularities that I would leave behind. Not the “what” but the “where” and the “how”. From that perspective, it feels less like throwing in the towel and more like switching tactics at the last inning — risky, but, for all I know, necessary. 

I fear that my dream will be lost to geography. 

That my friends will forget me.

That the sun will burn out any trace of my being here. 

I fear that I will never return to the only place that has ever felt like home. The only place I never imagined wanting to leave. 

But sitting here, I think I finally see what it is I’m being called to leave. It’s me, or a fading version of myself. The girl I was for 9 years — lonely, adrift, starving. Waiting for her dream to land in her lap. 

Maybe this is why I stay, because I love her, because it feels like an impossible ask to crumple her up, discard her, and never look back, when that new thing I’m running toward is a new me. 

And I do not yet know what she looks like.