On One’s Own

Wasting time to daydream about homes that could house art and love like no others. I’m tired of overpriced Los Angeles homes that reek of schemes to be tied down to and no musk of personality to at least mask such horrors. There’s not much left when removing these barriers. Why couldn’t I have an aunt who could leave me heir to a home that drinks up the sunset through large windows without bars or dusted blinds? Longing for a safe neighborhood that’s floating on its own and not with the help of garbage and cops looking to fill a quota. Just to walk out at sundown to calm anxious thoughts because walking anywhere is a pleasure at this point.

I want flowers to pluck at, to take home, and lay to rest alongside burning oils and shelves of books and impulsive vinyl choices.

I’ve taken a liking to interesting foods - not new to me, but new in the way I can normalize it when I nest a home of my own for once. Artistic cans of sardines, pretty and mannered plastic bags that give thanks and roses when taken, bottles of wine turned to vases and wall linings. It’s always the bottles of olive oil and leftover ribbons that get me. So dainty without trying, like everything I’ve always wanted to be - pretty without any consideration of the space it’s taken because somehow it’s necessary and expected of.

Walking around dusted secondhand shops just to leave with more ceramic dishes, lopsided blazers, and a stuffy nose is never wrong. The concept of leaving things behind to pick up new things is so naturally human. At least in this part of the world, where we pick at things until we grow restless like bored crows and oddly-dressed scarecrows.

Sometimes I can hear my mother’s yelling echoing at my ear telling me she’s just burnt the okra or scolding me to be more thankful than the other days for a ride to somewhere else on the other side of town. It makes me wish public transportation and the landscape came easier to us, so that the anxiety of lugging a car around didn’t have to sting me every single time the urge to leave crossed my mind.

I like Eve Babitz the way people like Joan Didion. It’s not better, it’s just a different realm of pretentiousness that I’ve grown akin to liking. I adjusted my world to align with these measures that I’ve soaked from my readings, to somehow try to redraw the feelings that Eve felt before as a means to escapism.

How to people simply get up and leave so easily? Pretty little tins of sardines move me, but never to the point where I feel capable of skipping town to actually own them in person. Maybe when I find myself and my person I can finally be on my own.

Photograph from Strange Plants II by Ren Hang