I don't read very much anymore. I turned 34 two months ago. I moved into a bigger apartment. I still walk the dog three times a day. We circle the neighborhood. We take a square-shaped route via the arterial roads - Riverside to Whitsett to Magnolia to Laurel. Cars pass and make such tremendous noise - the earth shakes, my ears pulse. I hate it so much. But where else is there to walk? There are no interior sidewalks here, no patches of grass for the dog to sniff. This is the rub, I think. This is what you get for moving to the valley for more space and quieter nights.
There is nothing for me to do while the dog walks and pees and sniffs. It is not the move, listening to music or a podcast. She is still reactive. We are still wary, the both of us - of strange dogs, of cars going over the curb, of stepping on broken bottles. We remain alert. Instead I pass the time staring at everything. I stare into the windows of passing cars. I turn my eyes to the sky and watch a red-tailed hawk cross from one telephone pole to the other. I count the different shades of green on one tree. I stare into the lighted windows of their single-family ranch-style homes. I peer into gardens, into puddles. I look at all of this and then I wonder about my life. What am I going to do? What's going to happen to me? All the old questions I still ask, even now.
There is no continuous narrative. I think about the girl who lived in the second-floor bedroom of Leslie's boardinghouse. This was in Boston, where the summer rain smelled different. I don't know her at all. My life in Los Angeles, my life of the last three, four years, feels so immediate to me and I could not even tell you why. I sever ties, I run from routine, I scrub the past.
That brief summer when I lived on the UES I used to run in the pre-dawn from York Ave all the way to the park. The shape of the city would change as I ran - the globes of light hanging above the prewar buildings, the cut of the doormen's uniforms. In the early dark I watched the flower delivery guy carry in fresh flower arrangements, carry out the old. I watched a woman slump against the security desk, letting her eyes close. It felt like a gift. It felt like everything, all of it, belonged to me. It was mine, all mine.
Early December the fog rolled in and the dog and I returned from our morning walks with damp clinging to our hair. In all that dense white there was not a soul out on the street. We were alone in the world. You lay claim to the things you can never own. This is what remains. This is what never changes.
