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A Love Letter to LA

Dawn Davis

Dear Los Angeles,


I can’t stop thinking about you. As I write, snow falls softly on a quiet New England morning. I wish I could send it west and blanket those raging hills with cold, calm peace. You’re such a core part of me- the only place I ever set down roots that were allowed to grow and flourish over time. The day I landed to stay for 13 years, I wheeled my suitcase down Santa Monica’s 4th Street, palm trees towering, roses and magnolias scenting the air, and I couldn’t stop smiling.


You truly felt like the city of dreams. I found parts of myself I had lost, and discovered parts I never knew were there. Santa Monica was my favorite place I’d ever lived. The therapist who changed my life lived in the Palisades. I fear her house no longer stands.


What happens to the displaced wildlife? Where do all the people go, when there wasn’t enough room for them to begin with? Can you still smell oranges and roses, the saltwater and the magnolias, or has smoke invaded every pore?


When I moved east to the Valley, I’d wake up to my car covered in ash. One morning, I inched down Sepulveda for my two-hour, 12-mile commute, with fires lighting up the hills on both sides. I thought, if those fires spread a little farther down, there would be nowhere to go. The traffic couldn’t move. For someone who craves freedom and open spaces, the view terrified me, and I knew I couldn’t live with the existential climate dread hanging over me any longer. At least, not in that form.


Now, I can’t even imagine seeing you with so much beauty wiped completely off the map. I cry when I try to imagine it. When I see it on my screen. But my mind can’t comprehend it.


What I am mourning, and what you will mourn as well, is loss and change. I have never lost everything in a natural disaster. But I have lost everything – love, home, health, job, close friends, and creative projects – all at once. It does indeed take years to come back from such losses. It takes sitting still in deep, profound grief. It takes confronting one’s own trauma, blindness, and failure. It takes an extraordinary amount of faith in something we cannot see; something that wants to lead us into a new future that we need, even when we desperately do not want it.


We are never the same on the other side, and this is Life. We can’t go back. At some point, we may realize that we don’t want to. But this is still a loss that will change us forever, and that must be recognized, held, and honored. I love you, LA. I see you. I mourn with you. And I know that everything changes with time. That this, too, shall pass.


Dawn Davis is a director, actor, writer, and producer. She was raised in the Midwest, spent many years in Los Angeles, and is now based in her ancestral home of Massachusetts. Dawn has a narrative feature film about to enter the distribution phase. She is slated next to direct a feature documentary about climate change seen through the wisdom of indigenous cultures around the world. For more, please visit www.dawndavis.net.



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