I came to Los Angeles entirely unprepared. I brought no jacket, as I lived under the assumption that it would be warm and sunny all day every day, and no car, because I knew my driving skills were not cut out for the ruthlessness here. Instead, I walk home forty-five minutes from work as often as I can. Los Angeles is not known for being a walking city but I’m determined to prove that assumption wrong. Most of the journey is down Santa Monica Boulevard. I like it best when it's warm out and only slightly windy. Trees adorned with oranges and lilies and bougainvillea eclipse the heat, and I traverse discarded mattresses and rotten bananas on the sidewalk. I came to Los Angeles for school, so claiming that I “moved” is a stretch of the truth. I claim that I’m here to advance my career, that I’m here to make connections, that I’m here to wait patiently for a big break – but these are all lies. I’m here because I wanted to be somewhere new. I wanted LA to make me someone different. 

Living in Los Angeles is far less mythological than it is to wonder what it’s like to live in Los Angeles, but I’ve found it imbues one with a similar sense of hope. Since I quit cigarettes, I’ve found myself smoking joints outside of my window and dreaming myself as the next Joan Didion or Eve Babitz, too high to realize I lack both Didion’s sardonic wit and Babitz’s romantic recklessness. Our one similarity is that I know how to pay attention. I study everything I’ve seen in Los Angeles. But I can’t remember it right now. The smoke cascades out the window and disappears into the sky. Bits of the skyline shimmer in the distance, the Netflix building towers on the other side of the street. There is always so much light, somehow. 

I’m thinking about ‘On Self Respect’ and I am finally understanding it. I am trying to be myself, to embody the person I envision in my head that I have hoped would emerge for years. Someone who was free from the thought of other people’s opinions, who didn’t lust for the validation of people I secretly judged myself. I wished I was both carefree and confident enough to spend time alone and not worry that I should be spending it with others instead. In LA I start to do that; whether it’s an actual change in myself or a symptom of being in a new city, in this new city, I don’t care to find out. I take the metro downtown to get a library card. I see Fast Times at Ridgemont High in Los Feliz and sit at a stool eating tacos by myself afterwards. I rent a DVD of Marie Antoinette at the video store and have photos taken of myself in the analog photo booth. I start working towards that sense of adventure I always wished I had, the independence I cling to so boldly. Maybe it has always been loneliness, but here, the difference does not matter. 

On my first venture into West Hollywood, I remark that it felt like we were visiting another country. Pink, purple, and blue lights are strewn above the street, as if there is some festival happening. Most bars and clubs have lines outside the door, the electronic disco thumping out the walls, sparkling from disco balls, and reverberating from neon signs from across the street. It is intoxicating and thrilling. It signifies the actualization of one hope I had for LA – that the nightlife would be wild and unforgettable. At the same time, I realize that I don’t really like to drink anymore. It’s expensive to pay for the four drinks it would take for me to relax. Instead I take an edible and continue to compare myself to Joan Didion, not that she would be found sitting at a stool at a club blaring old Selena Gomez songs, taking pictures of the disco ball, wondering who all these people are, what their lives are like. I worry that I spend too much time going out and not having fun, that at once I am wasting time and not having the wild experiences I need to have to make my 20s memorable. That I am paralyzed by my laziness and that my ambitions will remain insurmountable. My daytime anxieties attempt to crawl back towards me. I decide that the idea of nightlife is much more thrilling than sitting with exhausted feet in tall black boots, the high worn off, all your friends incorrigibly drunk, being the one tasked with calling an Uber home. 

I see two coyotes in Silver Lake across the street from the Vista Theater. My heart skips a beat when my friend points them out and we run across the street immediately, feigning a quick glance towards the empty street. They scamper away, barely evading the oncoming traffic and disappearing into whatever lay on the other side of the intersection. I’ve been told that you are supposed to make a loud noise to scare the coyotes away, but my instincts told me to run away, and philosophize on the experience during a 35mm screening of Repo Man that night. This city, which juxtaposes sunshine and noir, would also put wild animals against fragile, gorgeous constructions. It terrifies me and fascinates me. It seems like every facet of the city is alive as late as possible, that the coyotes are not too afraid at any hour – it is their city too, after all. It feels timeless to me, the marquee glowing neon green and purple but the projectionist rolling 35mm film. They sell Francis Ford Coppola wine and shirts that say “Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino,” and there are creepy statue-like figures high up on the walls on the sides of the theater. Los Angeles converges the old and the new, the historic with the kitschy, like a postmodernist fruit tree. It never ceases to be dreamlike. 

I debate a minor, inconsequential interpersonal dilemma from a coffee shop in Silver Lake – I don’t want to go on a group trip to Palm Springs. It’s probably going to be too expensive for me, and it’s definitely going to be too exhausting. The truth is that I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave the city, I don’t want to drive out to the desert. I’ve grown very tired of all my surroundings. I stress myself out to the point of tears until the light from the windows begins to stain my eyes. I go outside and stand in front of the Elliott Smith wall, on the phone with my mom as she reassures me. I take a few deep breaths and walk around the neighborhood, and gusts of wind push my hair around wildly. I admire the houses with spanish tiling, with magenta flowers tangled around wooden lattice fences. I remind myself that I am lucky to be here, my mom reminds me that everything is going to be okay. I tell my friends I can’t go, and walk back into the coffee shop – this time to write. 

The parts of LA that I have loved are the ones which never existed to me previously. In my first week, two of my friends from school who had moved out here – Sarah and Jonah, because I feel the need to wax poetic about them specifically – take me to dinner in Koreatown. We go to Dan Sung Sa, now one of my favorite restaurants in the city. We drink Kloud and eat spicy chicken skewers, rice cakes, kimchi pancakes, and corn cheese. I feel like I had never smiled and laughed so much in my life. Sarah brings me to a Suki Waterhouse show at the Roxy, where I take a few hits from her vibrating dose weed pen and gaze at how the heavy red curtains light the disco ball with the same shade, and cascade it across the whole room. As an admirer of rock history, I always imagined the Sunset Strip a glamorous, historic place. Pamela Des Barres strutted these sidewalks, and they should look every bit as seductive as she made them. I forget it is no longer the sixties, and the streets are plastered with billboards advertising the next terrible Netflix movie. It does not match its mythology. But somehow, I’m not disappointed. I dance next to Sarah to “Supersad” and admire every different shade of red the disco ball became. I expected Los Angeles to make me feel alone, like any new city should, and even as the Sunset Strip should have collapsed an LA myth I had constructed, I danced and sang and felt still the intangible power of the past. 

I do think that being in LA has made me someone new which was what I set out to do. Normally I would feel proud at such a reflection, like I do when I face some challenging interpersonal situation and come out the other side just a little bit more mature. If this is what it feels like to become more like yourself, then it is terrifying. I felt an uncanny sense of fear in an uber from Thai Town to Melrose with my mom when she first dropped me off. It was seeing the places which I had built up in my mind everywhere, tasked with being a part of it. Hollywood Boulevard, like I had seen it in Inland Empire, was real. So was El Coyote, Musso & Frank Grill, the historic, magical places of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The nightmares and the fantasies. Could I sense that dreamlike quality in the air, that wash of old Hollywood and dreams that have become bygones? Maybe. I think it has withered into desperation now, milked by aspiring creatives and greed alike. Have I stolen from it in my altruistic quest to be more me? Has it taken something from me? 

It’s not just Los Angeles which is so beautiful that it's vicious – my friends and I drove out to Point Dume in Malibu, each mountainous turn more breathtaking than the last. All the beach hedonisms are etched true in my memory now. We wade in the water only briefly because the water is icy cold. Willow tells me she always expected the Pacific Ocean to be warmer than the Atlantic, but because of the wind patterns, the opposite is true; some scientific explanation for a California dream deferred, but it still makes it even more mythical to me. We hike up a short cliff, the titular Point Dume, which was dotted with sprouting iceflower and yellow flowers which stemmed from tiny trees in a way that seemed acutely magical. I am so obsessed with this place that in creeps a subtle sense of dread, a reminder of the fragility of time, that I beg not to tarnish my final weeks here. I think it's my inability to stay here, especially when I can’t explain why. This city fills me with a deep envy, because to be important in Los Angeles is to be important everywhere.