I Flew Like a Dragon

Whoever says leaving home won’t fix your life is flat out lying to you.

It’s been a month since I arrived in LA.

While the change doesn’t feel as palpable as it did in the first two weeks or so, I absolutely feel like a switch has flipped.

Moving doesn’t erase trauma, it doesn’t cure C-PTSD or ADHD.

However, my executive function has markedly improved. I predict it’ll be even better after the remainder of the furniture building and unboxing is complete, since I absolutely went from excited about home goods deliveries to “I can’t wait to stop unboxing shit!”

That while it felt like I was leaving behind part of me in New York — the century of my people’s history that I felt beneath my feet since I was a child — I knew that going to California meant transformation, and coming full circle on my dreams of games, movies, and writing that I had since childhood.

I feel this weightlessness when I walk down Wilshire Boulevard that I simply never felt at home. I’m a stranger in a new land, yet it’s so familiar to me from years of it being imbued in our media plus my own frequent visits as an emissary and talking head in the games industry.

I now sleep on a bed fit for a cocaine lord, just like I dreamt of ever since I saw Scarface when I was a little girl. I saved and saved for this utterly ridiculous goth marshmallow, the entire thing barely fits in my bedroom, and I don’t even care if I never take a guy to bed in this thing. It’s SO comfortable and I can fit at least three fully grown Asian water monitors on there with me!

So, how’s it going?

I don’t feel as wracked with chronic pain as I was back home.

First I chalked it up to the ergonomic furnishings I splurged on, like the aforementioned cocaine magnate bed outfitted with a Purple mattress.

Not to mention the modern conveniences I always dreamt of, like a thermostat coupled with sprawl that’s impossible to obtain in an apartment in Gotham unless you’re in the same income bracket as Elon Musk. Sorry-not-sorry, once you’ve undressed into a washing machine, THERE’S NO GOING BACK.

There’s pain that’s always going to permeate my bones because I’m a child abuse survivor with C-PTSD, plus I’ve had a lot of foot surgery and connective tissue tears. At the time of writing, I’m looking into a study at UCLA on connective tissue problems before bracing myself for another round of horrifically painful and expensive stem cell fusion, if not another surgery. The timing of the study is uncanny: it feels as if I was meant to relocate at this precise point in history.

I knew I wouldn’t be completely free from certain agonies. But those general aches and pains I suffered are freaking gone. When you aren’t literally surrounded by all these shadows of the past, simulacra of your old selves and instead feel hopeful and that you’re forging something totally new? It can help with chronic pain! Turns out I was living in a C-PTSD trigger all this time, and that a new land was exactly what I needed.

Interestingly, it wasn’t easy going when I arrived.

Hogan Torah picked me up at the airport in this massive downpour that went on for days just like that Jars of Clay song from the 90s. It sure as hell wasn’t the southern California sun I’d come for.

Furniture deliveries kept being delayed or missing parts, and the Tuft and Needle duvet I splurged on was an epic fail where I kept freezing my ass off or sweating to death on the air mattress while I waited for my bed to arrive. (I now happily sleep under a blanket from Target, go figure. But it was all worth it to hear the movers say “I was expecting Al Pacino to come out of that bed!”)

My realtor found a buyer for my home in The Bronx incredibly quick. Who then waffled for almost an entire month on signing the contract, and when it was my turn to sign, I still didn’t have a workstation set up yet and wasn’t sure if my printer survived the cross-country trip.

Worse yet, I may or may not have had COVID. The Biden administration utterly shit the bed on testing infrastructure and because this is America, I didn’t feel safe approaching the numerous tents that had popped up around my neighborhood. The nearest city-run testing site was a schlep away and had a line that rivaled the ones I used to see for Metallica tickets, where you’d probably get the disease while waiting. It took a while for my new health insurance cards to arrive so I couldn’t just waltz into City MD and get a free PCR test like I used to in New York. Thus I don’t even know if I caught COVID, but I definitely felt like I had a mild flu for 4 days and self-isolated for 10 out of caution: not even getting to experience the gym and pool that made me choose this building.

In fact, I haven’t even gone swimming yet at the time of writing: it’s still too cold! Certainly better than the bomb cyclones inflicting Arctic hell upon the northeast, but still too nippy to entertain those morning swims I had envisioned when I applied for my lease.

But I knew from experience that just like my west coast tour in 2017, which I didn’t know at the time was basically the door hinge of my adult life, that the Jewish Wedding principle would uphold: you got all the disastrous parts over with in the beginning, so the rest of your marriage would be utter bliss.

Back then, it meant that the rest of the tour would be fabulous. Now, it’s that I would have an incredible life.

Starting a new life meant leaving behind old behaviors and schools of thought that no longer served me.

I primarily moved out west for a new start, a better life, and friends waiting for me being a major part of that.

But there was someone in this new land who I wanted to reconnect with where it blurred the lines between sexual and romantic. After all, I hadn’t dated or hooked up in my own homeland since the Obama administration.

It’s a “how we met” story that’s become a games industry legend and would warrant its own essay. I’m assuming this story is also over, given the outcome. But he was the last time I actually felt something and I wondered if I was going fucking crazy from isolation during my surgical recoveries then COVID.

My old self wouldn’t have bothered reaching out, out of the assumption he wouldn’t want to hear from me. My old self had also been used to cheat, and as Warzone would say, “Damned forever, marked for life”.

I naively thought the man in question would leave the girlfriend he had nothing in common with for the woman who understood him. I waited around like a complete dumbass, and gave up opportunities for both relationships and even casual sex partly because of those strong feelings but also because you haven’t seen grown-ass men gossip until you’ve spent your life in a subculture as insular as mine was.

Inevitably, it was totally fruitless tarrying. I then vowed never again to wait around, and to openly express hostility towards men who would dare attempt to use me this way when I am an ethical slut. And that if I caught feelings despite them being taken, I had to suppress and kill them because I may be a lot of things, but I am not a homewrecker or happy to be a side piece. No, you give me your fucking undivided attention. If I worked on becoming more emotionally available so I could be capable of something deeper? So can you.

I no longer let men treat me that way, as I now realize after years of therapy and self-work that all of my unhealed trauma made me think this shitty treatment and lot in life was the best I could do.

But I’m no longer that dead girl walking, and I SURE as fuck do not pointlessly wait anymore.

I reached out to this man I couldn’t get out of my head after all this time once I got numerous signs I could no longer ignore. The universe was screaming at me to do it when the final sign came: I saw he was apparently keeping tabs on me, as I’d been chronicling my relocation. I did the big scary thing and reached out. Then he dropped the bomb that he had a girlfriend: one of the outcomes I feared.

Well, I did not traverse 2,500 miles, cross multiple worldlines, and put my condo on the market to pay four times in rent what I paid as an owner to get more of the same.

I will never repeat the mistakes of the past, or settle for a half-assed involvement. I would rather be happily single than wait around for a man to make up his mind about what he wants.

I did not come here to grieve what I maybe could’ve had with him. Grief suffocated me at home. But my brain more or less forced me to grieve for a day or two, on the assumption that door is completely closed.

Because the heart and the clit know what they want; they still feel something for him even though my brain successfully committed an override here because backing off was the right thing to do after that bomb drop.

And it’s okay to grieve a little. But I knew that consuming myself with grief would not serve me when the entire point of coming here was to start over.

This is still just the beginning of a new life.

Maybe we’ll still have a chance together. Maybe we won’t.

But I can rest easy knowing that leaving that message on read was the right thing to do, along with the validation and comfort that I didn’t go crazy: he clearly felt something too. That’s already a subversion from what I typically had back east, where I’d pine for a guy who didn’t want me while needing to grab a baseball bat when rabid horny fanboys would try to follow me home from hardcore shows.

Possibility of romance is also only part of this new picture being painted. I came here to make games, make movies, and raise a bunch of giant lizards and toads while hanging out with my friends. I feel those mommy hormones kicking in despite being adamantly childfree, and I’m constantly looking at parks to determine which one would be ideal for taking big lizards on walks. I’m being stricken with this NEED to hold a giant monitor lizard like you wouldn’t believe!

I’m on the bus or the Metro for barely half an hour to go to exciting places, and I can walk to so much more than I could in The Bronx. I’ve had moments of culture shock, like the man with a guitar who came on the red line one day to sing Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” and much to my surprise, the conductor came on the PA to tell him to stop and do that on the platform because “passengers are entitled to a quiet ride”. On the rotting MTA, no one would blink.

I’m still getting used to the wide, lively streets that suddenly give way to eerie blocks with actual alleys. I’m surrounded by hundreds of restaurants, but cooking at home is actually enjoyable now that I have a real kitchen!

New York will always be home. As Agnostic Front once said, “I have New York blood running through my veins”. I haven’t played in hardcore bands in years, but I could see myself starting again out here. My homeland and culture will always be part of me. That influence will also show in any new bands I start.

It was a long, labored decision to leave, especially with the financial expedience I sacrificed. But life is short and I don’t see why I should feel doomed to this sad, half-assed life when I don’t have to do that.

I don’t see traces of my old lives here at all. Every day, I wake up and see the city and those majestic mountains next to this dragon mural, all from my remote aerie at the very top. It only drove home the feeling that I chose the right building.

All I’ve known in Los Angeles for the most part is love and respect. I’m creating new context on those palm-lined streets. While it hits differently blasting No Redeeming Social Value in my friend’s car racing down Caheunga Boulevard instead of the slalom of Queens Boulevard en route to a show, I feel this abject joy and liberation I simply never — and probably couldn’t — feel in the homeland.

I’ve got a perch now, and I flew like a dragon. And I’m never coming back.