People in L.A. are so nice, and so open
Also would you like a free copy of my book?
Love notes from Siel is a weekly newsletter from Siel, who used to live in Los Angeles and is currently back in L.A. If you love the notes, subscribe for free.
Dear friend —
All at once, everything started breaking.
First, my laptop began to shut down at random when it wasn’t plugged in. Then the home button on my iPhone broke. Two days after that, my kindle refused to turn on.
It was time to go home and get my shit together.
Home is still Los Angeles — partly because that’s where I say I’m from when people ask, and partly because I still know this megapolis better than any other place. That said, when I returned to Los Angeles last month, I’d been away for two and a half years. Well, okay — I’d been back for a weekend in February last year for a covid booster, and in October the year before that for a flight out of LAX, but I hadn’t actually lived in the area since June 2020.
Returning to a place you know well after an extended time away is a trip. Everything’s at once familiar and unfamiliar. Sure, there are aspects of L.A. that remain unchanged: SoCal sunshine, gigantic freeway exchanges, Randy’s Donuts. But other things are noticeably different. LAX looks cleaner now, less grubby. A bunch of MedMens have sprung up and all Lorna Janes shut down. Even the climate feels foreign at the moment, the air weirdly chilly and the landscape preternaturally green, thanks to recent record-breaking rainstorms.
It wasn’t hard, though, settling back into the city. An Uber took me to my home-for-the-month in Venice. I picked up my car (Thanks for taking care of it, Edan!), drove to Trader Joe’s, and filled the trunk with foods I’d missed while on the road: everything but the bagel potato chips, milk chocolate covered peanut butter pretzels, sweet potato crackers.
Driving home felt effortless, almost luxuriously so. How easy it was, being able to buy a whole week or two’s worth of groceries and transport it home via a vehicle in one go! This was just not a thing I could do when I was living in Mexico City. Or Athens. Or Lima.
All my other to-dos went smoothly too. A new kindle was delivered to my doorstep within 24 hours. A nice guy at the Apple store called Brian liberated me from the shackles of assistive touch by setting me up with a new synched phone in under an hour. When I stopped at Sephora to buy a face scrub I couldn’t find abroad, the girl at the checkout gave me a free deep conditioning treatment for my hair too. And everyone spoke English! Communication was so easy!
That night I went out salsa dancing and met a cute guy and we made plans to hang out the coming Saturday. Driving home giddily, I almost went down the wrong way on Olympic — but everyone in the intersection was super forgiving about it, patiently waiting for me to three-point-turn my way into the correct lane.
People in L.A. are so nice, and so open, I thought, driving on. You know, I could just slip back into my old life here. It would be so easy — the sunny days, the lulling sway of palm trees, the soothing glide of automobiles over cleanly paved streets. In a single day I could eat bibimbap in Koreatown then pick up mochi on Sawtelle then take a fitness class in Venice then watch the sunset in Santa Monica. In what other city could you do that? Sure a single hot yoga class cost $29 and a PB&J sandwich $200 at Erewhon and rent on the westside a million dollars each month, but maybe I could get a full time job for an overfunded tech startup again and make money until it went belly up —
It was a soothing fantasy, this California dream. For a while I really leaned in to it. I even began to wonder: Why had I left Los Angeles in the first place? Why was it I’d even wanted to leave?
Then traffic came to a standstill, and I remembered.
Love,
Siel
P.S. Would you like a copy of my novel-in-stories, Cake Time? Or maybe one of my poetry chapbooks? I’m getting rid of my L.A. storage space and everything in it — which means I’m giving away all extra copies of my books —
If you’d like one, heart this post then email me your snail mail address. Just to be super clear — email me your address (hit reply in your email program) versus leaving it a public comment on this post as the latter will make your address public to everyone on the internet.
First emailed, first served — while supplies last. U.S. only because international postage is expensive.
Three links you might love:
On Femcels. Mary Gaitskill takes on the topic of involuntary female celibates with her usual sharp and brutal insights. “I think they are looked at more askance than their male counterparts because of their appearance or personalities or whatever somebody might find to bitch about. Precisely because of the belief that any woman can get sex and one who fails to do so is a freak.”
On our serial femicide culture. Why are we so obsessed with men who kill a lot of women? Sarah Marshall explores our love of murderers and the culture they grow up in. “As far as I knew, the only route to the things I wanted or needed was through soothing and circumventing an angry man.”
On female silence and writerly success. A woman’s writing career starts picking up, so her boyfriend dumps her. “The more I share about our relationship and breakup, the more vindicated he will feel in his fears. But if I don’t write about it, he succeeds in forcing my silence.”
Dear Siel, I feel I have been living a parallel life to yours for the past year or more. I am also from LA (Redondo Beach & Palos Verdes actually). Last year I drove up the California coast to Seattle, then across northern states to Washington D.C. area, then to Southern France (Montpellier), to Greece (Athens, Pyrgos) about a week after you. Then to Barcelona and Copenhagen, Now just back to LA. I anxiously await your Love Notes to stimulate my brain and sooth my month. You often write about the same things I am thinking... it is uncanny. I met you in PV and got your Cake book and followed you ever since. I'm slowly writing a book about my mother.
Cheers, John Edwards
Los Angeles can be beautiful and I do miss it especially during winter but unfortunately for me, a owning nice house in the suburbs just wasn’t a possibility when I lived there. I’m also older and having less people around in a gigantic plus. But I’ll always look fondly at my time there. Everything was a blissful dream except for that one night.