Here I am, memorializing Los Angeles. It won’t be my last post, but I guess it’s my first. My first to touch on what it’s like to be haunted even as you continue to live out your life, feeling the ghosts of every memory you made here assaulting your senses as you walk around.

I’ve had absolutely no choice but to accept it during this pandemic — I am super, super, super attached to side hustling my body for service. Right now, I don’t have some debt to pay or some basic income that needs to be met as our economy crumbles and the dollar is reset.

There was a point in time where I really, really made an effort to brush up on my Mandarin for the express purpose of answering for myself at dinner parties. Every time I came home for the holidays, I knew I’d be paraded around and talked about in some capacity.

Sometime toward the middle of quarantine 2020, I got really obsessed with buying shit on Amazon. A lot of shit. As I type this, I just went through a mass unpacking because I got anxiety about actually opening the shit I bought.

We’re sitting on the beach, sand on our towels, listening to the chatter of little kids playing and the waves washing up. Suddenly I stand up, hoist my sunglasses onto my head, and I hand my friend my phone.

My mother ditched the stay-at-home-mother lifestyle when I was 9. So instead of coming home to some snacks on the table and the sounds of cooking dinner, I left school and came home to an empty house. My sister was at daycare, my dad worked late, and my mom worked even more late — from 7AM to 8PM every day.

Years ago, his sister handed me a bag of just red Sour Patch Kids. She had drawn my name from a hat weeks earlier for our debate team’s Secret Santa. Now my gift had arrived, in all of its one-flavor glory. “Minimalistic,” a facetious classmate walking by said, snickering at my present.

It can clump into physical sickness. At first a disease of the self-concept — soon it becomes something that spreads into the body. A feeling of nausea. Sweaty palms. Dry throat. Or a nagging in the back of your mind that turns into a tightening of the chest.

The more hits Dorian Grey took to his soul, the more wretched became his likeness, hanging on the wall in a pretty frame. So the famous book, The Picture of Dorian Grey, goes. The main character Dorian sells his soul to the devil. Pretty as his