This City Was Mine

I was in Los Angeles last month. Returning to Los Angeles always feels like traveling backwards in time; the city is still haunted by memories of all the things I was once so desperate to escape from. The suffocating gender identity I didn’t see any way to safely shake off. The sometimes violently unstable family that would never understand. For the better part of 20 years I lived in the expansive sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, yet for all the time I spent with peers in the arcades and pizzerias of the Sherman Oaks Galleria and the Northridge Fashion Center, I could stake no claim to those places, nor to the halls of my high school, or to the stretches of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway I sometimes glided along at night next to my father, who sat beside me silent behind the wheel, the distance of misunderstanding between us feeling vast and frighteningly volatile. I was like a ghost, an illusion of a thing, with something real but obscured from view underneath, something suffocating but terrified of coming up to the surface for air, too afraid and ashamed to exist, curled up like Samus in a morph ball, lingering in some small corner of my body rather than ever unfolding and inhabiting it fully.

But one L.A. evening last month, as the sky faded to a smog-tinged orange, I recalled the gorgeous orange sunsets of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas’ Los Santos, a city I remember so much more fondly than its GTA V counterpart; every bit as juvenile but less aggressively jaded and cynical, at least in my memory. The fact that it doesn’t look realistic certainly helps; I could inhabit it as I could inhabit my daydreams and fantasies–fully and unafraid. And I remembered the exhilaration I once felt after some triumphant mission or another, sitting astride a stolen moped in the center of the Grove Street cul-de-sac under an orange sunset as “Eminence Front” by The Who blasted from the bike’s tinny little speakers and I imagined CJ–I imagined myself–radiating all the world-owning confidence of Prince on his motorcycle in the poster for Purple Rain. I circled the camera around CJ like a master cinematographer exercising her genius, communicating to this film’s audience of one that the city–not just the dreamlike virtual version of it inside my TV screen but the real one, too, the one I’d lived in for so long but never felt like I inhabited at all–for this one moment, the city was mine.