Hell-a

I think that most people don’t see themselves as beautiful. 

Not in a self-deprecating way, I just think a person gets used to their own face, loses the ability to be stunned by it. 

We might notice the way light hits our hair and picks up the red, or the dark ring of blue around our eyes before a crooked, hooked nose fucks the whole thing up. But we can’t be surprised by our own features. Can’t be hit with the whole effect the way a stranger can.

I think places are like that too. Every time I drive along the 118 or the 2, I am stunned by how huge the sky is, the way the mountains hold the freeway. The green stubbornly clinging to them, the clusters of houses and lights that emerge from their sides, the nestled pockets of city. I imagine they feel safe there, in the trapeze space beneath  telephone wires, in the arms of the mountains.

Everyone I know speaks of LA with some disdain. A friend of mine refers to it exclusively as HELL-A.

I have started falling in love with ugly things. 

my crooked nose 

dirt on stucco

the valley.

When you can’t see the whole of something, you have to love it in pieces.

I love it in stretches of wire, in misspelled yard sale signs, in rock slides and blind turns. I love it for its colors, for the blood sacrament of the freeways. 

The way it’s always ten degrees hotter in the valley. My little mountain town, a pair of shoulders and a throat. Hot wind-breath unsticking my hair.

I didn’t have air conditioning in my car the first summer I spent here. I drove around delirious with heat, dizzy with love 

for the dirty gutters and the Stories patio 

For the relentless sun, the rumble of shifting earth, the smells,

 the haze,

 the fear

and god, oh god, the love.