Los Angeles

                                                             Los Angeles

This city. Leaving this city.  I feel everything and nothing at all.  I am sad, I am not sad.  I am not grieving a home.  I walk the cracked and urine-splatted concrete of Sunset, an orange globe sinking fat and swollen over the warm greens and yellows of stucco box buildings.  I think, "This is California."  This is California wherever there is California, it is just louder here, the colors warmer from the sun, the browns of the earth and dust thickening the air.  A jumble of houses crowding the hills, fighting space and light with the fierce, determined trees and shrubs, the true green of a neon city.  Smells reminiscent of Port-au-Prince slums, sights calling up corners of Mexico, hillsides of Brazil, ghosts of Central America.  This is California.  I am sad, I am not sad.  I am grieving a love.  I am grieving the ache in my womb, the yearning of my throat, the loss the speed the loss the struggle to gain to hold to grab all as you feel it slipping away, gone.  I never held it.  Never knew this life. 

This city.

                                                                                               Dec. 2004, Emilie Parry