Los Angeles

I lived in Los Angeles for six and a half years. After I moved to the East Coast, I continued to go back to visit family every year. And yet, whenever I am reminded of LA, it still invokes a strange sense of unrealness in me. It's the blaring, glaring, blinding, relentless light that eats your brain.

I suppose the harsh and pervasive sunlight is not limited to LA. Phoenix? Palm Springs? Las Vegas? There may be numerous Western cities like LA, but LA was the place where I called home for a substantial part of my life. By now I have been living in Washington DC for more than a decade. Here, or in New York, in London, in Auckland, I can imagine making a normal and real life for myself, in which I could feel a solid sense of my existence in the sun, rain, snow, or breeze. When I dream of the streets and views of LA --- always seen from inside a car, of course --- they are still like a dream. So strange, so alien, so fake. A plastic, glossy sheen over everything, the whole world bathed in JJ Abrams' signature lens flare.

Jumbled, ugly low buildings along six-lane boulevards. Stretches of land without a patch of shade. Highways and streets crammed with cars with not a single human figure exposed in sight. Like in a dream, the LA faces always turn away, not interested in breathing a word or throwing me a glance. Perhaps that is the root of this unrealness. Even though people are no friendlier in another metropolis, at least I can surround myself with strangers and feel like I am walking among the living. LA is like a ghost town, devoid of warm bodies. That is why I knew I could never find love in that city. That is why, though I think of it with nostalgia from time to time, I can never call it home.