Get your dreams just right.

The hardest moment of the Los Angeles trip came on the last full day in the city after I'd gone on a two and a half hour hike alone in the mountains up to Mount Disappointment and San Gabriel Peak. On the car ride back from the mountains, I found out the friend I was traveling with lived 150 miles from where she grew up, and I managed to say, "I don't know..." before I started crying.

I'd cried a little when I saw the Colorado mountains and the way they rose up, and I'd cried a bit on the hike, and I cried so hard in the car ride back.

I'd asked her if there was anything from her childhood she remembered that she didn't have anymore, any seasonal fruit, anything she used to eat that she couldn't easily get anymore, anything that could send her back, and she couldn't come up with anything. She said there were apples in autumn and strawberries in summer, but those come around every year. She said she used to go to a local burger chain after school and when she goes back there it sends her to her youth, and the day before, I'd felt like screaming when I found a loquat tree in Silver Lake with ripe fruit. When I bit down on a fresh loquat, my first in nearly twelve years, I was hit by the memory of light in my hometown when they came in on the giant tree half a block from my house, all the different shades of green and the precise slope of the sidewalk and the way the street bent slightly so I couldn't quite see my house from where I stood on that one spot across the street and half a block to eat loquats late in the day when the air was thin and soft on my arms and the apricot-citrus flavor would sing through my teeth.

We went to In-N-Out after and everything was exactly as fun as I remembered, and it was nothing compared to that first loquat.

In the mountains, I hiked up and looked around and hiked back down, letting the sun hit me hard and counting 48 verified lizard sightings and taking in the sheer amount of sky over me, and it was on my way back to the car that I stopped to take in the trees at a trail junction, really take them in, and I suddenly started reeling at the sensation of looking at trees. Of looking at trees I knew.

Three days earlier, we'd gone to the Huntington Gardens - we went on my birthday, one of the best I've had in a long time - and she talked about how she marveled at the open-air cactus garden and the Australia section and the native plant areas because she lives in New Jersey and grew up in upstate New York and hasn't spent a lot of time in places where those plants can freely grow like that, where you put them in the ground and they thrive, and I'd been walking around looking at the oak trees and the tall cacti and thinking how this looked right, this looked good, this was just what the world was supposed to look like, this is what I recognized, this is what I remembered, this is how it's supposed to be. Those are trees as trees are made. That's the sky as the sky is to be seen. That's sunlight as it's supposed to land on my skin.

We'd be driving through LA and sometimes cut through some hills or past some nature areas or get a good look at the mountains in the distance, and my breath would catch and I'd stare at the shape of the hill or the curve of a tree branch because it'd been almost twelve years since I'd seen such a branch, over a decade since I'd seen that kind of jut of a mountain, I hadn't forgotten the mountains but somehow I had because I couldn't remember looking at them with such longing or such happiness just to be looking at them.

I'd heard a lot of jokes and a lot of warnings about the driving, but I knew I didn't have a whole lot of places to be at specific times. Maybe we'd be so delayed we wouldn't get to see everything we wanted and that'd still be fine, the city as a whole isn't going anywhere on a timetable I need to worry about, sit back and roll the window down and it'd be fine. And it was fine. Saturday, I met with andtheyfightcrime and we got to maybe half the things we wanted because of traffic and parking issues, and at one point I had to camp out in the car for at least 20 minutes while she tries to figure out some issues with the garage. I knew it would be hours before I had to hurry, I knew I'd seen some LA stairs and eaten glorious ramen and gotten a pretty fabulous view of the LA River. I sat in the car and read Denise Levertov and waited patiently and things turned out okay.

Sunday took a lot of driving from the house where we were staying to the La Brea Tar Pits museum to a restaurant in Silver Lake to some Silver Lake secret stairs and then back again, long chunks of time in the car, and seeing a lot of the city and really understanding the scale - both gigantic and sprawling and very small and human at the same time, the opposite of New York, building out instead of up. It took more time to adjust to the way the city spread itself out than anything else, letting myself accept it'd take a while to get anywhere and when we did, we were pretty much staying there a while because it's hard to jaunt over. Within a half-hour of getting on the freeway our first day, after disembarking the plane, I commented, "I understand why people ride motorcycles here. I don't agree, and I understand." It took us ten minutes to drive to the ocean when it'd take an hour to walk, which still strikes me as grossly unfair, but being ten minutes from the ocean took most of the sting away.

I got to go swimming in the Pacific twice: Thursday afternoon for about an hour and a half, and Monday evening for about an hour. Thursday we both wanted to enjoy the beach in our own ways. Monday, the friend I was with wanted sunset pictures, and I pretty much threw on my swimsuit when she suggested going out because if I could go into the water I knew I absolutely should. Both days, I got used to the cold water and dove under to fully immerse myself, followed the tide out or let it push me in, barely beginning to understand how small I was compared to the ocean and fully grasping how I could still enjoy myself inside of it. Nothing is beneath notice for the ocean.

Nothing is important compared to the mountains and their harsh, hostile indifference. It's not their concern, the people that walk on them and their little stations and plaques they walk to.

That wasn't hard for me to remember, walking on those thin trails winding through them.

What was hard was not knowing how to tell the person I was with that I'd managed to walk back to a world I hadn't seen in nearly twelve years. I could tell her the words, and I didn't know how to give her that feeling beating all the way through me. In all those years I'd been away, all I had was memories, pictures, songs, faint echoes, ghosts that slowly left of their own accord. It wasn't that I hadn't been to my hometown; I'd been utterly, completely away, never going farther west than Illinois. I could pull up something vivid and no matter how vividly I remembered it, nothing knocked me over the way ocean waves did, nothing knocked through me the way the sight of a low-slung street that could have slipped out of my hometown and settled down right behind where we were staying could manage.

Los Angeles was full of uncanny sights like that - of things I recognized so intimately that I'd never seen before. Hummingbirds at flowers, crows in trees, mist resting in a back alley in the morning. Open-air stairs and sunshine cutting up walls. Shady sides of mountains with ferns and damp soil almost right next to the skeletal remains of trees that died in forest fires.

Los Angeles isn't a beautiful city, but it's full of beautiful things.

It's not a city I could easily live in with all the driving needed, and it's a city I'd love to visit again soon. I barely got through a quarter of the things I'd written down to do, and I know there's even more stuff waiting for me the next time I step off a plane.

And I know it's where I can eat a loquat, and remember.