Tuesday, July 26, 2011

You do what you know because what else is there?



This morning my boyfriend and I woke up at 7:30 to get boxes left over from the night's inventory at Ralph's. We're moving to Oakland on Sunday. It'll be my first time living outside of Los Angeles and I'm feeling all of the usual feelings: excitement, fear, anxiety, sadness. While walking down Bundy Dr. this morning I looked up at all of the palm trees bending towards the ocean and thought, I'll miss that. But how do I know what I'm going to miss? I have some basic ideas - my family, the taco truck on Olympic and La Cienega, staying up all night at Jeff's and smoking cigarettes on his balcony - but I don't know what little things will tug at my heart while I'm up there. That scares me a little - I don't want to miss anything. I want to sling my bag over my shoulder, throw up the deuces, and never look back, but I know that's not possible for me.

Something interesting: I'm going to be living a handful of blocks south of where my grandmother's childhood home was (is?), and near where my mother and uncle were born and lived for the first few years of their lives. I learned this yesterday during our hour-long phone conversation. She told me about waist parties at De Fremery Park (admission was your waist size in cents), places she used to go, my grandfather. She also told me that when she was kid, she flew down to Los Angeles to visit her aunt, and, upon seeing how sunny it was, resolved to move here when she was an adult. I think about these things, the conversations I've had with my mom over the past few days, the swirl of family history surrounding and influencing me and my decisions, and I think about how no matter how frightened I am about living somewhere I don't know very well, how sad I am to be six hours away from eating sushi with my little sister and having her talk my ear off, how anxious I am about every little thing, for the first time in a long time I feel like I am doing something right, and that makes it all worth it.

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Maira Gall