Owner of the world
Sep. 25th, 2026 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wooriaK8 revealed she was moving to Texas. It was a tenure-track job at her old college in a city called Lubbock. I didn’t know where that was. “How close is the closest city?” I asked. We were sitting in a park by Carthay Circle, which was shaped rectangularly, adjacent to somewhere called Carthay Square. The park was a triangle. We had both brought our own coffee in an effort to keep it a cost-free meeting. “Dallas is an eight-hour drive away,” she said.
Maybe because I had already known for some time that she wasn’t too attached to L.A., this didn’t take me by as much of a surprise. And so even though I felt a little hole getting dug into my heart, I didn’t cry like I had about the others. Neither did I cry for Hana, who told me this same day she was forgoing grad school plans for a new job in the East Bay.
It sunk in that everyone was leaving me for something better, and that every day I took my friendships for granted.
I went to go see Oldboy at the USC theater. Mazzy was there too with their friends. It was the first in a film festival series, and instead of planning to do any real work I was going to watch as many movies as I could that weekend. I was less impressed with the movie the second time around; it was funny how that happened.
*
Already a year had passed since the loss of Beachwood’s mother to Alzheimers. Beachwood took the week off, so I did my work commute by train.
It felt electric to be able to walk to the metro station from my house in a matter of minutes. It almost seemed like I was in an entirely different city. I tended to miss out on mornings because of my carelessness, but it also tended to be the time of day when our lives were most genuine. It was good to be up and out when the air was still a little chilly as if we really were in the autumn season in a place with no seasons.
Going down by light rail after a year and a half of driving through concrete spaghetti made me understand how much distance a freeway created between you and other people. Only through the train car windows could I actually see the neighborhoods between downtown and Compton, and the murals, and the people walking to work or school, the decor they added to their front yards. And unlike other parts of the light rail lines, which tended to be on busy streets parallel to vehicle traffic and businesses, this one had a long stretch that was mostly just multiple lanes of rail. That meant you saw the people living right next to the tracks, too, normally hidden behind walls. I couldn’t get out of my head one image we passed by: a young woman perched with one knee up on the side of the railroad, unmoving, her black hair long and straight like in a Korean ghost story, faceless from our distance to her.
It somehow took me three and a half hours to get home from work: my ride to the station, my other coworker, was a slow driver; the train was delayed to the point it led to conversation between strangers; it was approaching rush hour and the light rail bent to traffic. I had a video interview at 3 but I was nowhere near home, so I got off near the trade college and had two minutes to find a place to take a call on my computer. It almost ended up being the side of a road. Luckily I managed to wander into the open part of campus where there were tables and a couple noisy teenagers. It did the job, at least for an interview for a volunteer position at the new museum I was getting progressively less enthusiastic about the more the recruiter told me about it. From there I took another rush-hour light rail, sitting next to a man who took up half my seat and near a kid who couldn’t stop giggling to himself and chowing down junk food, and I finally transferred onto the bus, which immediately popped a tire. Everyone de-boarded pinching their noses. We walked to the next stop and waited for the next bus. I got off midway to pick up two No Doubt CDs someone from Facebook was leaving me on their stoop, and it was just awkward enough of a location to make it easier to simply walk home from there. But it wasn’t too bad.
I ate a hasty cold dinner, changed, and hopped back on the bus to catch another movie in Hollywood. Someone sitting near me in the theater smelled a little ripe. Thinking Mazzy might be here too, I searched the seats for a familiar face. Who I did see was someone a few rows behind me who looked like Acquaintance of all people (who I was awkward with, mostly because of my falling-out with her boyfriend years ago, which was a result of my falling-out with my boyfriend years ago). I turned my head like a whip and didn’t dare look again. Once the screening was over I was one of the first people out the door.
I walked to my old place to pick up some mail, pretended I didn’t see Ernesto sitting on the bench outside, and made small talk with Cooper, who seemed to never leave the apartment. My phone died. On the bus I sat behind someone who was wearing a screw nail as an earring.
