MadameBastet-firing-neurons

And The Spaniards Dreamt of You Too, Califia

There will never be any real goodbye. I will leave you, but you will remain with me, always. There is no place far enough in this universe for me to escape you – to escape what you’ve done to me, to escape my feelings for you, however conflicted and mixed they have become.

You’ve broken my heart, you know that don’t you? You, who bore me onto these mean streets all those decades ago; for now - where once there was adoration, now there is anger, where once there was devotion, now simply despair, where once there was wonder, now silent weeping. I gaze upon you and you are a stranger now – and yet truth be told, I am the stranger now, in a strange place. How and when did it happen? Through changing seasons…mere seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years – you became another entity altogether – and now you speak to me but I know longer understand your language. You look vaguely familiar, but your charm, your allure, your sense of golden promise is gone and when I walk the streets, I know, I know. I am the stranger in a strange land. Your slow, insipid, subtle and obscene abandonment was cruel and it has left me with nothing but the ruins of nostalgia firing in the neurons and synapses of my mind.

I believed we would be together forever. I loved you once, with a madness, intensity, fierceness, a blindness, and an insane devotion that others laughed at. Who could love such a hollow land? Who could find truth in a city where truth is bought and sold to the highest bidder? Who could find beauty in this wax museum, this horror show of vanitas?

But alas, they didn’t know you. They never ran down Wilshire Boulevard at 1am; screaming, echoing laughter into the neon Hollywood night. They never sat, in serene silence, waiting for the hot kisses, the ashen caresses of the Santa Anas, the promise of those warm caresses, and passionate blazing infernos. They never sat and watched the palm trees sway in the azure breezes – the promise of diamond seas and eternity spread out before you. They didn’t sit in Venice, in the 50’s café, drinking Cherry Cokes and listening to Patsy Cline’s eternal sorrows on the old jukebox. They never drove 90 miles an hour down Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, the wind screaming in your ears, youth and time and immortality your best friends. They never drove into the dark hills of Beachwood Canyon, and heard the ghosts of a glamorous world now gone; the laughter, the clinking of glasses, the smell of stale cigarette smoke lingering in the jasmine-filled air, the soft music coming from warmly lit windows, the blue-glowing televisions flickering shadows on the walls of tin box heavens. They never knew you like I did. They never knew your glittering streets, the winding pathways of some forgotten paradise.

This is where I began, so many years ago. You were so different back then; a bright young place with all the tomorrows in the world spread out before you. And as I grew alongside you, I learned of you, from you, explored you, loved you, through insane violence, through race riots, endless trials of the century, slow speed chases and nightly high speed entertainment. This is where I gave myself to you, unconditionally, as I breathed in air so thick and brown and dirty it seared my lungs, burned my eyes. I swallowed your poisons willingly because I could not take my eyes off the beauty that was you.

I loved you, even as you shook me to the very core of my being, the earth under my feet unstable, no promise of stability ever to come in this desert-cum-oasis of disingenuous promise. I let you corrupt me. I gave into your seduction. I fell for your empty promises. I believed in a tinsel-town world of glitterati and all your stinking, lousy lies.

Once upon a time, you were the Golden Child – the place of promise, of future, the ultimate conclusion to Manifest Destiny. They tried to strip you of all your gold, but they came anyway. The dream was the promise. Wide open highways, and the smell of orange groves for miles. Opportunity to be found around every corner. A man could bring his family here, settle down, build a home, find a life, and grow roots. And yet now…now you are a tarnished shadow of your former self; you are a third world country barely masquerading as a legitimate city. The disparities are brutal now – there is no chance for anyone but the bourgeoisie, the ones who hide behind their gated compounds. The rest of us are like the rats in the palm trees – the winds of brutal reality shaking us down, down, down. I barely recognize you – your streets are cracked and lead nowhere, your hubris is bringing you down brick by brick like the Tower of Babel – and now, now, all of your children all babbling – incoherent nonsense I don’t care to listen to.

You have no idea how much this hurts. To see the love of your life, broken, empty, hollow, the neon lights beckoning still, and yet you know that behind this Glitterdome is nothing. Nothing but the ruins of yesterday.

I keep trying to find what once was. It is pathetic and I know it. I am living on memories. I am living on nostalgia – in a fairytale I’ve created in my own mind. I keep coming back to you, searching, a desperate yearning in my heart for the connection, the feeling of home. It is not there. It will never be there again, as it once was. I will say goodbye someday. And yet, when the end comes, when the last bits of consciousness flicker through my dying brain, I will see you, in bits, in pieces, in the blinding sun, the screams of children, the azure seas, the palms swaying in lonely colonnades. And to you I will give my earthly remains, for in the very final end, I will come back to you.