LAX departures
We're really in it now. Deep in the masked summer of social unrest- waking up to infections and deaths rising every day. 'Black Lives Matter' yard signs outside homes and 'For Lease' signs outside local businesses. Emails informing us that yoga studios are closing for good. Mums in the local Facebook group announcing their new wash & fold laundry services, or their granola delivery to make a few extra bucks. I wake up to texts from friends that they are separating from their husbands. It's strange to see on Twitter 'Actor Wilford Brimley dies at 85' or 'NYC Journalist Pete Hamill dies at 85' when we are losing the number of people who died on 9/11 every two days. Whose death matters? An Instagram post reads "What's really going on in Turkey?" and another asks for the cops who killed Breonna Taylor to be arrested. A text I'm sending auto-corrects 'hello' to 'help'. And I remind myself, "we are lucky", but of course it doesn't always feel like it.
I felt almost naively positive and hopeful earlier this year. I think it was a false sense of security baked into me from living in Australia and England, where it feels like the government is at least trying to do right by it's citizens. My breaking point was when it became clear that my two best friends would be leaving LA to go back to Sydney- and within weeks of each other. The first rumblings about departing were back in May when everyone was having their WTF reckonings about the future. At first, it was passive consideration but soon concrete plans were being formed, and then everything happened all at once. I kept hearing "There's no point in waiting around" and I didn't have a reasonable comeback. There was talk of being at Bondi sipping flat whites, being with family and letting the kids play freely. There was talk of wanting to be back home, where it felt safer.
My five stages of grief went something like this:
denial. Maybe they will miss their flight or not get their kid's passports in time. They can't just leave! Haha *cue maniacal laughter*
anger. I hate this country! How is anybody supposed to MANAGE!
bargaining. I'll book a flight home for November.
depression. Things are impossibly bad. What's the point of anything.
acceptance. Many people I love are leaving.
These are my "what are you up to?" friends. The ones you can spontaneously pop over to, the ones you will reliably hang out with for Thanksgiving (having no families to go back home to for this American holiday) or July 4th or kid's birthdays. The ones that I would drop my daughter off with when my husband got his appendix out. We were pregnant and had babies and built lives together in this city. In truth, these friends had felt like home to me for a very long time. And just like family, we ebb and flow, but the acute comfort of knowing they were around is hard to describe.
When we went into lockdown in mid-March, there were six of us on this particular group chat discussing how we were getting through it all: the days with the kids, sharing photos of our baking, telling each other to listen to Reply All's 'The Case of the Missing Hit', sharing memes about toilet paper hoarding and scheduling 'House Party' game nights. By the time this was going to be over (an abstract time!), most of the group would be living on the other side of the world. At some point in early July, the thread even became a pile-on for America. And I understood, of course. Living under Trump is a nightmare and this country is rotten to it's core in many ways, but I still found myself feeling defensive, "I still live here!" I felt like a used car salesman peddling the benefits of Los Angeles "what a town! Think when it's back and running! Remember the great food? The road trips? The hikes! Korean spa! Tacos! Things can be great here!"
Normally, I’m the one doing the leaving, from moving around every 5 years growing up, to to moving across the world multiple times as an adult. Their decision to leave triggered my abandonment issues and made me question my own family's choice to stay. We all had different circumstances for sure, but what was our plan? What were my goals? I knew I didn't want to leave, I still loved LA (the sales pitch was working on me, at least), but I was enjoying the cruisiness of not having to interrogate my life choices much further than that.
The direction of escape is toward freedom. Ursula Le Guin.
I felt weepy being in their neighborhoods of Echo Park and Highland Park. I felt a weight on my chest like wearing an x-ray bib. "I will miss you every day" I wrote in their farewell cards. The sense of loss I felt seemed disproportionate. And of course it is. It's clearly about what's happening on a macro level. It's about the overarching feeling this year- one of helplessness, one of a loss of control. “We did the right thing damn it, we locked down and washed our hands and wore masks" and it felt like none of it mattered. You have to "be like water" I told myself trying to just flow and absorb these Buddhist ideals. But when I really concentrate and think of water for 30 seconds, I think of a leaky roof or treacherous ocean waves or Naya Rivera drowning in that lake. I don't think this is what the monks meant.
I've always found a sunny, Sunday afternoon to be sad and anxiety-inducing. There was one particular Sunday in July when the loss of the LA life we had felt enormous. I was driving to one of their houses to say goodbye and pick up their leftover quarantine staples like flour and chickpeas. All of a sudden this sprawling city felt like a remote country town. Everything felt dull and pointless. We were renovating the garden and I complained that I'd have no friends to invite over when it was finished. I felt that post-breakup feeling of a breakup that wasn't your idea “We could’ve had a nice time together”. I pictured the missed BBQs and the dinner parties. The movie nights with the kids playing in the next room over. I was sad to not be a part of the day-to-day minutiae of each other’s lives- figuring out next steps in our careers or what kid's behavioral predicament we were grappling with that week. The closeness of being in the same time zone and weather pattern. The same long weekends and news cycles. For my daughter to be around Australian voices discussing 'Bluey'. Their plans had always been to move back eventually but it was always ‘a few years away’. At least then we would not have told the kids 'no' when they asked if they could hold hands through the car window.
My friends, meanwhile, were dealing with enormous stress and uncertainty themselves. They were packing up and moving across the world with no solid plans. I needed to be here for them and not bitch about missing out on happy hour in my backyard. They were concerned about entering 2-week hotel quarantines in Australia with two kids. They didn't want to leave under these circumstances either. They didn’t sign up for living in a country where wearing a mask would become politicized. We'd see each other less, but it would be better, I told myself. This was going to be a new phase in all of our lives. Hayley Nahman wrote in her newsletter about the hedonic treadmill: “the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes.”
They were leaving. Everything was going to be different. But everything was already going to be different.