When I was little, I read all the time—compulsively, incessantly, nipping at the bottle of fiction and make-believe to disguise the fact that reality stunk. My substance of choice is still the world of fantasy, and its mind-altering effects. My brain works overtime to spin the facts of life into something more palatable, and easier to digest. As an adult, I don’t read quite as much fiction as I used to—I’ve been hooked on other people’s words for so many years that I need harder stuff now. Epiphanies and revelations, wisdom and self-help, endless reassurance from others who have felt what I felt, and got through it.
I named this substack Pie in the Sky because I wanted to invoke the phrase magical thinking. Part of me is always spinning in a tight, frantic circle on my tiptoes, trying to weave meaning from my experiences, from my life. I started PITS around the time I was coming to see that I was a lifelong magical thinker; that I rarely, if ever, saw things for what they were, or dealt with messy, boring reality. Instead I was always thinking about two months ahead, always speaking in somedays and maybes and hopes and wishes. Someday I would be a successful writer, a mom, a good and normal person, a world traveler, a person who contributes to her community--maybe then I would be able to stand existing in the present tense, without having to daydream just to get from one mundane moment to the next.
In August, I reread Didion’s essay about leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That.” A line has been burrowing through my skull ever since: “it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the fair.” At first, I thought that the phrase resonated because I was thinking about leaving Los Angeles, and I was worried that I had put off leaving for longer than I should.
Later it occurred to me that my life was the fair; not the books, not LA—that all my life I’ve been twirling as fast as I could to avoid the moment when I must stop and see that this is it—real life, and this is all there is. It’s not that I daydreamed so much that I couldn’t tell the difference anymore between fact and fiction; it’s that my life became the daydream, and I struggled to take it seriously because it has always felt like my real life was about to start, any minute, any month now, and that the present moment was just a tiny window before reality officially begins.
But of course this is all there is; this is as real as life can get.
*
For the past month I’ve been trying to write a love and goodbye letter to the city where I grew up, at long last. There was a specific way that I could feel about this city because my time here was never going to last forever—it was going to be only for a while—and then I got to hoping that the while would go on and on, and then, quite suddenly, the while had lingered on too long and I saw that once again the pendulum had swung and it was time to leave the party; the cleaners were already throwing away the crumbled flowers and the dance floor was empty and it was just me, circling the floor with the ice cubes rattling in my last drink. And I remembered for the hundredth time that there is no orderly progression to life, that there is no way to proceed with eternal certainty, but to go as far in one direction as you can see, and trust that one day you will notice that you are drifting too far, and you will have to take steps to correct course, and this process continues on and on forever. This thought is comforting, to me; it reminds me of that Voltaire quote: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”
I moved to Los Angeles because at the time the move addressed most of my needs; it was far away from home, it was (allegedly) warm, it was about as blue as a state could be. Sunshine is my natural element, and the bitter midwest winters had started to feel like a permanent condition. I wanted to be far enough away from where I grew up that I could become someone brand new, separate from all the versions of myself that I’d outgrown. The winter version of me was sadder and smaller than I could bear-surely if I could outrun her, I could become something different. California has been the promised land for hundreds of years, especially for dreamers, and even if you don’t want to be famous or make it in Hollywood, it still resembles a vision, a golden, larger-than-life dream.
Grief is so strange; by the time I moved to LA, I’d survived the first two years after losing my dad. Shouldn’t the worst have been behind me? But the gray clouds were getting thicker, and the pressure in my chest was tightening, and my vision was narrowing, and all signs pointed to: hit the road, jack. I cared a lot less about where I went and a hell of a lot more that it was firmly away. From Ohio, sure, but also from my old life and my former selves—I wasn’t so delusional that I thought I could outrun the point of impact, but I had a vague idea that if I could get to the mountains first, I could plant my feet on the higher ground so when the last numbness wore off, I would stand a better chance of surviving it. If I had the ocean and sun at my back, and my feet on the mountains, then I could face my losses, and maybe after, there would be something left of me-pieces to pick up and glue together, or maybe I would be flattened and refashioned into something new, some version of me that had gone through the kiln and come out again.
There is a lot to be said for surviving hard things, if you survive them; there is no other way, after all, to know exactly who you are and what you can survive ahead of time. It's a poor man’s steak; cold comfort, and it doesn’t compare with the illusions of the smugly whole; but it is worth something, after all. To survive the thing you thought you couldn’t means something; to have gone through it means that you know more about who you are and what you can do. I wouldn’t choose it over being smugly certain and whole; yet, it has a value. It has something to do with grace, with life having balance, with the existence of compensations even for suffering, and ways to survive and grow past even killing wounds.
*
We drove into Los Angeles on a rainy day in January; first came the long push west through Nebraska and Colorado and Utah and Nevada, then finally we hit the Mojave, and then the triumphant march through Pasadena and into the city. My sister E and I took turns driving across the country; naturally, I seized the wheel for our arrival. The mood in our car was electric. The promised land was in sight. We had the sense that we were taking part in the centuries old tradition to go west, go west and don’t stop until you hit the ocean. How many times has someone who is somebody come from Ohio, and ended up in California?
Rod Wave was singing “Calabasas,” and I didn’t yet know where that was, and there were shiny new Teslas and Porsches bumper-to-bumper with us on the slick mountain roads. I was not accustomed to insistently visible status markers yet, so I could say, “look, a Tesla,” which is something you can only say in earnest once or twice.
I was twenty-six when I arrived, which was not very old or young, but it was enough years of having potential to sit a little heavily on my shoulders. All I’d managed to figure out so far was that I had to get out of my hometown.
While I was growing up, I loved my hometown like I love my family, and for some of the same reasons; because they made me who I am, because I was born there, because through fate or intention I am made of the same stuff as them, as it. The dark clay dirt is my dirt and their speech sounds like mine and I still say “supper” and “boughten” and people still ask, overly curious, where I’m from. The answer, the sticks, is scribbled all over me, in my teeth and manners and tone. I loved it because I was born there and so I thought I belonged by default, and because I didn’t yet know that sometimes the ugly duckling gets driven from the nest for smelling too different from its nestmates.
Los Angeles is a show-off, I wrote, a couple weeks after the move. Every piece of the landscape says, look at me, look at me, but very loud.
I didn’t love it right away. If I was moving somewhere for love, I would have gone to New York. But I didn’t want to go to my favorite city in desperation, in despair. When I move to New York, I plan to be happy. I needed something else from LA, the city for people who have either left New York or are going to New York or wish they were brave enough to try New York.
The contrast between bright, brittle, aesthetic Los Angeles, and me, a Mennonite girl from a small town, was great enough that there was no risk of mistaken identity. I could never mistake the city for myself, so I could live here at peace, like it was an extended sabbatical from my old life.
In this city, in these intervening years, I walked and prayed and pleaded and wrote, all these verbs that I mean as synonyms. There were plenty of days when I was sure I would never be okay again; plenty of sunny mornings that sat in my stomach like undigested rocks. The first year, I asked my sister again and again: “are we going to be okay?” I meant it sincerely. As in, I did not know the answer and couldn’t intuit it; my best guess was that the world was bad and I was bad and if I wanted to get better, my only hope was to stay put and allow purgatory do its work.
Before the move I had been unhappy for a very long time. Or unhappy isn’t the word. I was recovering for a long time, recovering not to health but to life, to myself. I was trying to adapt to living in an internally changed landscape, as well—all my life I had been a daydreaming girl with a father, and now I was neither. If I was not dreaming, or fathered, or young, what then?
There was enough space in the city for me to ask these questions without tripping over a small building or running into people I used to know, before. It was far enough from my hometown that I could stand to open my eyes; it was big enough that I could dare to say that I want to take life seriously, and figure out what I want it to mean, and it did not seem too much to ask for. I could say, I need other ways to live, different paths to follow. There was plenty of room to be earnest, here; there was plenty of room to try, very hard, very visibly.
A year after the move, I flew back to Ohio for a family reunion. My uncle was there, my uncle who knows what it’s like to flee a place as if it’s contagious. He said, urgently, as if passing on a lifeline that someone had once given him: “Don’t you dare come home. Stay in California. It’s better for you to be near the mountains and the ocean.”
If I’m leaving, I have to go now. I am leaving Los Angeles in the happy middle, before the ending. Someday I may have to remember how to stay somewhere again. One day it might occur to me to wonder if I can run and linger at the fair at the same time.
I came here to see if maybe this was a place to learn how to heal, how to surrender. I bumped up against the foot of the mountains, and I found wells of water, and high places to look out over the city, and sacred rocks that I could call my church. The landscape is heady like a migraine, the colors almost nauseously blue and green and piercing pink. I bet in a thousand years from now I could still paint it with my eyes closed, from memory.
Thanks for reading. XOXO Angie
Oh Angie, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to sit in silence and wait and watch and let that heal the soul!