A thousand years as measured by human beings is so miniscule as to be insignificant. The grand spiral of existence begins at a point neither of us could have imagined. We listened, but we didn’t care. Life was simple, a slice of time, little meaning, if any, behind it. It meant nothing.
There were leaves on the ground. Do you remember? The old eucalyptus, the years of confusion. The ice cream fell to the ground because you allowed it to. I bought you another, we walked the path to the space between the tennis court and the pink stucco walls. Years of rigid pine needles poked at you. Your brother was getting in trouble all the time. We talked about that for a while. I kissed you, we opened our mouths. You kept your hair back with a blue barrette, I touched it. We weren’t in love. I forget if I cared.
1997. Your eyes fell to his hand. We were walking home, past La Brea by that point, back before the crab shack was there. He never let it go. He should have tossed it in the bushes. A bloody shank. He’s still in prison. I never bothered to keep in touch because I learned to stop caring. I’m trying to forget the lesson.
On the Baldwin Hills, in the middle of Los Angeles, we saw the entire world in all directions. To the west: the derricks, the dry and dusty hills, the slow descent into the ocean, visible as a glare in the wind on a clear day in the winter, after the rains. At the very edge, in Venice, Mar Vista, Marina Del Rey, we found anyone we ever hoped to be, the one love, the boys and girls we wished we could fuck. It was drunken magic, high off the fumes. South was the lower half of the sprawl, some rough neighborhoods by some accounts, never by ours. Our homes were there in the suburban mass, like a beast we could never name, holding us chained to the broken asphalt, liquor stores, and small inner city dreams that we dared to strive for. Beyond them, beyond our imagination, the likes of Palos Verdes, the mall at Del Amo, so far away it seemed. The parking lot was the oasis, the mall a grand sad kingdom. Smoke stacks spewing their filth along the shore where our walks showed us places we would would fall into in a haze. North was Los Angeles in its entirety, the industries of fame and fortune, decaying mansions and the faint outline of a hope for a metropolis gone horribly wrong. There was land to be had and unlike the cities to the east they held nothing back. Cover it all, pave it over, give us sidewalks to stumble across and neon to admire. The red brick tiles of every other home gave it all the air of the fatherland that raped the motherland. Beyond that, beyond the glow of the girls and the droop of the homeless, the Hollywood statement of ownership, the mountains, and the sweltering sex valley, all places we visited but never found much use for. And the east, the land of the palms. We found the broken bottle there on Normandy that still had a third left, I gave it all to you. We walked by the hallowed halls of the home for spoiled children and wondered what it would be like to be there, so foreign a concept. An education, books, reading, mathematics… was that what they did? We never found out. Our life ended before any of that, before scores placed us and the world came to an end.
Your child now sits beside you somewhere, your husband working hard, earning enough. You don’t wonder about me, but I sit and think back on everything, the history of what the world was, and I consider that perhaps I never left.