This is a gift really. The ability to know ahead of time that you will be missing, a few months from now, all that you see. It’s at the same time sad, delicious and wondrous. It’s what my life has become. Blown by the wind a tumbleweed is a passenger. Never knowing from one minute to the next where it will be. Maybe the tumbleweed knows this and likes it. Maybe this ball of thorns and skeleton, carried along by forces outside itself, can feel a moment is precious because it knows it’s fleeting.
I only have a month and a half left in downtown LA and as I walk these busy, frenetic, crowded streets filled with thousands of urban people I will soon not see, I already miss it. I savor it, I taste it, I feel it and absorb it with the passion of a man on his last few days. I drink it in with the thirst of a man without water for weeks. It’s so sweet.
Tomorrow I will be somewhere else, somewhere wondrous no doubt, but not here. Not Broadway as the sun sets and becomes dark. Not a bridge over the LA River or the 110. Not Grand Park in the cool of the evening or the grit of Chinatown or the scary desolation of Santee after sun down. The magic of Art Walk or opening night for the Lakers at Staples Center will stay with me forever. DTLA is magic.
Why are you leaving, you might be asking. Good question, but a tumbleweed does not have a choice. It must go where the wind takes it, and by it’s very nature it can’t decide these things for itself. The wind must decide.
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