Okay, let’s talk about place. I moved to LA from Montreal in early July. When I moved here, I was stubbornly determined to like it. I was born in California, and I liked the idea of embedding myself in a place I had lightly mythologized. Now that I’ve been here for a total of 4 and a half months, I am thinking back to how I felt in the first 4 months I lived in Montreal. I was miserable, living in an off-campus dorm with the worst haircut I’ve ever had and a mild weed dependency. I was forcing myself to go on excruciating Tinder dates, and then luxuriating in the shame that followed these exposures. Comparatively, I am doing (and feeling) a lot better now. But while the odds are stacked in LA’s favor, I still feel strangely unsettled by the ease of living here. It’s a city that moves like one long day. It’s a decent day, where you get sleepy around 1 or 2, and regain your energy by the time the sun sets, but this leaves it restless. Since I arrived here, I can’t shake the feeling that something is about to collapse. In the absence of winter, I am coming to realize it is all the more necessary. Winter demands a period of dormancy — creatively, physically, mentally — and without that, you start to expect yourself to be constantly productive. LA is the poster child for the productivity paradox: no one has a “real” job, but everyone is busy. It’s a hub for creative industry, so the kind of creativity that flourishes is that which can be easily monetized. It feels indulgent to live here, like I am opting out of a more tangible form of suffering, the kind where the sun sets at 3:30 and you frequently lose feeling in your fingertips.
Every now and then, I am struck by an ache of missing Montreal that knocks the wind out of me. It was not easy for me to love Montreal at first, but once I did it became irreversible. It was the place where I became this version of myself.
Here are some things I feel I have lost in moving, or have yet to find here:
Stuff on the street — finding stuff on the street was one of my favorite triumphs in Montreal, and not only that, it was easy. During the moving months, there were days known for being particularly good for street object accumulation. I found clothing, silverware, discarded trinkets, and my favorite bowl. My roommate once found a microscope (broken, but still). Our apartment was decorated with pieces of salvaged student art projects, likely tossed out when they received a disappointing grade (whether that was to the apartment’s aesthetic detriment who can say…) I once found a cumbersome blue chair behind the thrift store, and a man helped us carry it 6 blocks home. In Montreal, I willingly and frequently gave my address to strangers on Facebook marketplace. People would come to the door to buy something from me, only to realize they’d been there before to buy something from one of my roommates. We could have practically registered as a small business.
Good things from the free Library. The first few months I lived in my second apartment in Montreal, I found really good books in the free libraries. In actuality, I think I just hadn’t experienced living in a city where these libraries operated in a functional way. I found CDs, an old recipe book (in Greek), a copy of The Corrections by Johnathan Franzen (this book is free library royalty, it’s probably in 1 out of 4 free libraries at any given moment). After the first few months, the quality tapered off in the one near my house, with occasional gems here and there.
I have failed to find anything really remarkable in the free libraries here. I did find a copy of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler (which I never read), BUT which I brought back to Montreal with me, only to abandon it in the free library by my apartment.
A free library is, at its roots, a microcosm of the neighborhood where it lives. This morning I stopped by a free library in Frogtown on the way to a cafe and found a much more interesting selection. Frogtown borders the LA River, and has a bike path running along its length, connecting it more organically to other neighborhoods and making it a place that people naturally pass through and shape. The neighborhood where I live right now, on the border of Cypress Park, feels a lot more spatially isolated and lacks the kind of movement and interaction that makes for a good free library. Free libraries tend to be better in neighborhoods where people are cycling in and out, and abandoning objects often by necessity rather than choice. These conditions endow a free library with an element of magic; you are more likely to find something that was, at least at one point, treasured.
Facebook Groups for Bartering. Okay, in LA these purport to exist, but I haven’t found one that feels agreed upon. In Montreal, there were groups like Bunz Trading Group and Chez Queer for community bartering, lease transfers, and other opportunities for housing and exchange. Although I’ve joined a few here, they lack something that’s been hard to pinpoint. Ultimately, I think it comes down to the different ways of relating to space in a city that operates primarily via public transit or walking vs. a city that depends on commuting by car. Neighborhoods in LA function as separate entities, which makes the prospect of picking up a free dresser or pair of shoes that are in the Valley feel next to impossible when you live in Silverlake. Or maybe I’m just lazy… Furthermore, neighborhoods develop their own identities with less of a permeable membrane between them. Any place can have distinct demographic boundaries, but the fact that neighborhoods are separated by freeways and hour-long traffic makes distance feel abrupt and significant. Places retain their boundaries more stubbornly; the transition across space ceases to be gradual when it’s happening on a scale built for cars, rather than one parsed out by metro stops. Stay tuned for further examination.
Good Reasons to Make a Playlist. When I lived in Montreal, I would make new playlists as the seasons rotated into position. Each week shifted as the cold trickled in. The trees on Mont Royal were a thermometer, then a clock. In terms of the weather, it is still September here and will stay that way through January, before suddenly leaping forward into May. When I first moved to Montreal, I made playlists about feeling socially isolated, whereas now I feel, if anything, socially bombarded. It is easier to make playlists when you are lonely than when you are overwhelmed.
I know what you’re thinking…what did you expect!? Places are Different. This is true, but beyond this, I think I underestimated how much Montreal is specifically, and uniquely, the habitat for all these things I love. They have simply not emerged elsewhere in the same capacity. The boundaries of that ecosystem are shaped by factors that don’t exist here. For instance, in LA, lots of the streets don’t have sidewalks. You are made to feel unmoored when walking, the infrastructure evokes unease. Last week my boyfriend and I walked into a volunteer-run bike shop down the street from our apartment. As we talked with one of the volunteers about a mountain bike I was interested in, I detected an unusual feeling of recognition. I realized it was the first time I had walked to a place like this in months. In Montreal, I used to walk all the time, or otherwise bike, to places in my neighborhood. I etched out my surroundings more slowly, neighborhoods came into relief as I learned how long it took to walk between them. In LA, distance is less proportional to the body.
The longer you stay somewhere, the harder it is to extricate yourself from the spaces you inhabit. How much of your identity becomes the grocery store you frequent, your favorite coffee shop, or the street you walk down every day to get home? You are the things you do each day, and whatever you do happens somewhere. Place is the groundwork for relationships too; you remember people by the library floor where you worked together or the house party where you were introduced. You might even be able to spontaneously recall the address.
I can’t imagine that I will ever miss LA the way I miss Montreal, but I am trying to be forgiving in the nascent stages of my time here.
Here are a few things about LA that I am fond of:
California is, unfortunately, beautiful. When I would return to Montreal from visiting LA, this was the absence I felt most keenly. LA is beautiful in the way of a place that is static and unafflicted by seasons. I have my issues with this, but it is also nice to wear a tee shirt in November.
Ladies of Los Angeles. Although the Facebook group landscape here is quite different than in Montreal, it is not without a few gems. I joined one group, Ladies of Los Angeles, that has been a great source of entertainment and inspiration. I’ve seen people (ladies) use the platform to ask about toxic relationship dynamics, financial decisions, and an*l bleaching, amongst many other topics. The confessional atmosphere of the group speaks to the physical disconnection across space: there is a level of anonymity that emerges simply because LA is so big. People share requests and inquiries about specific neighborhoods across the LA metro area, and I’ve witnessed multiple attempts at in-person meet-ups sputter to a halt as people try and fail to bridge the problem of physical distance. In Montreal, physical meet-ups were at the center of most Facebook posts and were an expected endpoint of interactions, mainly revolving around barter and exchange. While some posts were simply looking for advice or sharing, these kinds of posts were significantly rarer than those involving physical meet-ups. Ladies of Los Angeles operates under the tenets of digital, rather than physical, connection. Another significant feature that I’ve noticed is that Ladies of Los Angeles is saturated with loneliness. It is one of the main reasons the group exists; I myself panic-joined during my first month in the city when I felt confident I would never again make friends. Posts in the group frequently allude to a lack of community or a desire to generate connection in the “real world” by sending out signals in online spaces. It’s hard to assess whether or not these transitions into real-world friendships are successful1. In Ladies of Los Angeles posts operate as cathartic releases that are vulnerable, silly, and frequently courageous. Equal parts a plea for response and a shout into the void.
Okay, that is all. If you’ve read this far, thank you!!! you are Cherished <3
Stay tuned for a separate post that is just about Facebook Groups (i.e. Ladies of Los Angeles), but this time with Research??
I SO enjoyed this (“California is, unfortunately, beautiful”!). Thanks so much for sharing - can’t wait to read more!
P.s. If I subscribe to substack, does Lennie get the dollars?
i also moved to la this past summer. i've tried writing about this city but it's so hard to describe without resorting to cliches and you did this so well.