Outside My Window
Outside my window, the pink final moments of sunset splash on the palm tree that sits on the curb. In a few minutes, it will be gone and replaced with the dark of night. The road is barely wide enough for a single car to go down with everyone parked on the sides, but the driveways promise little room here in Los Angeles’ shadier neighborhood. A gunshot rang out last night and I was comforted by a sound that I know well. It is foreign to my roommates, who thought about calling the police when it shook the house and that made me laugh.
I have not talked to anyone today but a store clerk and my landlord. A man stole passionfruit from a wheelbarrow in front of the house despite the fence that is supposed to be a deterrent. This same man grappled with the locked doorknob of my apartment while I stood in my room and held my breath for a scream. When he left, I left shortly after. Perhaps I’ll go see a movie today, I thought, but realized I was already late and retreated back into my second story bedroom, where the air stands as sticky and still as it is outside. I forgot about the thief until now.
They say Los Angeles is a lonely city. It is funny to share loneliness with millions of people. A kind of irony that knots your stomach in the worst way. There is a sort of adherence to introversion vs. extraversion these days; it is not something I try to entertain. For all intents and purposes, people say I am introverted. An extroverted introvert. This is more to say: I like to be alone. I love to be alone and I hate being lonely. It feels worse to not be alone in my loneliness.
A lonely city that is consistently 72 degrees and sunny feels like its own low-grade suffering. The day begs for play, for conversation. I know it takes sifting, but the last person I spent time with took out his phone while I was venting about a problem and the incident made me further delve into myself and the comfort of my own space. I’m not that foolish now.
Somewhere across an ocean, the man I love sits in a different time zone. As the sun rises where he is, it sinks much like my heart here. So many of us spend our days pining for love that is elsewhere. And in the elsewhere that holds him, it rains. It never rains here. And I find myself pining for that, too.
Outside my window, the air is thick and hazy. The days burn differently in Los Angeles — the lonely city — almost as if they do not burn at all. This city plays a cruel trick on us all, like the absence of clocks in a casino. You do not realize that hours have passed and your money is gone and you have been breathing in the exhaustion of a million spent hands. Days meld into one another when the weather does not change and one day will be the day that changes it all and if that day is in March or August, could you tell the difference?
I feel myself getting older. I can see it in my face. I am grateful for the laugh lines, mementoes I have taken from the better times in my life. And outside my window, there is the city of Los Angeles — a place that was once a vellum covered pipe dream. And one day that window will change and the city behind its glass will look different and I will not be lonely or alone and I will miss what I see now.
