Burning Myths: Los Angeles Essays and Other Musings

It wasn’t that I hadn’t been thinking about Los Angeles at all. In many ways, I never stopped ruminating about the city. And not just the mythology of it, or how its myriad reputations stalked my reality. But back then, the truth was that no singular notion of the place existed.

Nor was there a chance that city bore any present tense that could be substantially observed by the masses.Certainly not without the collective mourning of my generation’s past and future. Perhaps we still held on to the quiet yearning for our future, our nostalgia... it was the summer of 2020 after all.

During this time, I’d been both chewing on it, like a dried-out pit from a plum off a tree in my backyard in K-town.

My lease included a provision that specified-- “on one day only” --the matriarch of my landlord’s family would come and pick fruit from all the backyard trees. My roommates and I were to refrain from picking anything until after that day. When she finally arrived in late October, she parked behind the security gate. She moved about the yard with an odd disregard for the nauseating irradiance of heat cast off the cement driveway surrounding her family’s old craftsman.

My roommates and I receded into blindspots of the green single story, either flattened against structural beams on the porch or in corners of bedrooms, corners adjacent to built ins where the cupboards contained solitary shadows, which spilled into drawers where, supposedly, forgotten things were once kept.

Once the matriarch left, I jetted out back. The intensity of excitement dulled by the reality that whatever I was to harvest from each branch was because the matriarch had passed it over.
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A city which forces you to simultaneously remember and forget what others have already taken; demands from you an ignorance and intimacy with what has been given and taken from them too. Just in the way one must believe there was once a flame just by encountering the ashes.

It’s a city whose totality cannot be accounted for alone by summing its parts. And I try to make sense of this strange arthematic by documenting Los Angeles’ small parcels, superimposing each new plot on top another until the whole is opaque and dimensional. Something to counter magic hour.

Such is this proverbial pit. I’m turning it over with my tongue, endeavoring on an endless walk through its streets. I fear falling in. Is it enough to sense the crevasses in the topology. Or else we'll al be looking and hiding from where the tectonic rip wrings out the light on the horizon.

I

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instagram//@jacy.bryla
twitter//@y esterdaysCamel