On Venice Boulevard sits a solitary wall of orange and grey blocks at the end of an empty path. This wall leads to a pilates studio that was once a dance studio where you danced with a man who told you that he loved you, but he didn’t. Users use, and avoidants avoid, but that awareness comes later.
Tonight, on this muggy night, you want to go back to dancing, follow Rihanna’s advice and “shake the stress away”, but you’re locked out and stuck in more ways than you can count, so you lean against this wall. Your purse and keys are inside. You’re not going anywhere.
If you’re going to feel stuck, Venice Boulevard is a good place to try and get unstuck. Venice Boulevard is all about transitions, not just linear ones filled with buses and Priuses and e-bikes and taco trucks and homeless people pushing rusted grocery carts, but the nebulous, inchoate ones that catch you off guard, the ones that change you—like now. On a humid Tuesday night in late August, locked out of a dance studio, on the brink of a career pivot and a break-up, coping with the whiplash of your empty nest and a nostalgia for your summers in the Adirondacks in Upstate New York, you encounter something unexpected in the least likely place: transformation.
Renewal happens in darkness, even darkness punctuated by fake light. Decisions always look different in daylight, but for now, you can be alone with the few hours left in this day and wonder why many things don’t work out, and inexplicably, some things do. Outside, you realise that you have to stop dating projects. You can’t fix anyone. You’ve got to fix yourself. This is what being alone on Venice Boulevard by this wall reveals to you. A quick break for some air to cool off becomes this spiral into worry, this crying about your future while L.A. zips around all indifferent, and this wall has got your back—literally. A quiet friend. Zero judgment. You’re still standing.
You can be anyone right now.
Venice Boulevard is a major east-west artery, always pumping with energy. It connects downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific, and tonight, it’s a good place to be sad, though you didn’t know you were going to be sad until you found yourself alone next to this funky wall that’s tucked away from the traffic, unnoticed by many. No graffiti. No business signage like the rest of Venice Boulevard, which is so anchored by stone and neon. Venice Boulevard’s energy will lift you up tonight. That’s why you’re locked out, this wall taking in your sadness, and it occurs to you that if L.A. bulldozes this orange and grey blocked wall to build something new and shiny in its place, you’re going to feel a significant emptiness.
The dance studio offers “ecstatic dance,” an odd term given that many of the dancers talk about moving through grief. Ecstatic dance is popular in L.A., like rollerskating in a bikini or surfing or talking about a Mars-Saturn conjunction at a backyard fire circle.
Dance shakes things loose, and there’s nothing ecstatic happening tonight, not for you. You took your grief outside, and now you wait for someone to let you back in. You can feel the dance studio vibrate with a beat. This studio is about to close and move to a new location in Santa Monica, which is far enough to be too inconvenient to drive to for mid-week dance.
This wall lets you observe all this change and momentum, lets you observe all the endings looming around you on this late summer night.
In December, when you revisit this wall and see the dance studio replaced with another banal, earth-toned sparkling new pilates studio, your heart sinks.
No one has yet noticed you outside, unable to get back inside.
Life happens either too fast or too slow, and here, against this wall—no sign of when you’ll be back on the dance floor—you need the pace of life to pause, a break from all this near-constant shifting that you think is happening because you’re middle-aged, but the truth is you’ve been pivoting and shape-shifting since you could walk. Anyone who lived under the same roof as you growing up knows this.
The wall wants you to hold on to this singular moment, be still, not dance, weave these few minutes outside alone into your L.A. life, your L.A. story. The wall wants you to remember who you were, who you are, who you will become.
This wall listens to you cry. You cry about your teaching career and where it might lead. You cry about your writing career and where it won’t go. You cry about the man inside the dance studio who brought you to this place—his history is too much, and your optimism is going to be crushed by his pain. You cry about your daughter being back east already, another year of college, another year of growing up and moving away. You cry because you love L.A. and can’t move back east, that the East Coast is exhausting and has wreaked enough damage, and your seasonal affective disorder is a weight that no happy lamp can fix. L.A. sunlight is medicinal. You need to be here. You need the sun to feel like yourself and the night to dance and forget.
A man approaches the door and signals through the glass, asking if you’re okay. You fake smile, wave him off, indicating everything is fine when nothing is fine because you and the wall can’t be interrupted right now. He smiles back and returns inside.
You cry some more because L.A. understands you in a way your family members do not. L.A. is all about reinvention, and how many times have you reinvented yourself now? What better place than to reinvent yourself behind this wall on this street when no one is looking? Venice Boulevard was born from dirt, a dusty track along the Pacific Electric Railway more than a century ago, and now it’s where you buy vintage lingerie. This street is in a constant state of metamorphosis, and this wall here wants you to realise that, like Venice Boulevard, you’ll keep shape-shifting, and that’s okay.
A minute or two later, a different man approaches and opens the door.
“You okay?” he asks.
He holds the door wide open. You sniffle everything back up your nose because you don’t want to appear upset or vulnerable, not to a stranger who’s showing kindness. You’re ready to go back in. You join the other dancers. The event ends, and you leave with the man who invited you. He asks what happened. You tell him you got locked out. You don’t tell him the rest. You keep things upbeat even though you feel like shit. You’re good at that.
Back at his apartment, the two of you order tacos, drink wine, and have sex. You talk about an upcoming trip to the desert that he’ll cancel a few days before you’re scheduled to go. Six months later, an actor holds your hand in a dark theatre while the two of you watch a play that’s really good and very funny, and your mind wanders. Theatre is a distraction. You break it off with this actor the following weekend. It’s a relief to be alone.
You frequently drive by the orange and grey wall because Venice Boulevard is part of your everyday life, yet you never noticed that spot until you were locked out. The wall appears bright and lonely in the daytime. Things always look different under L.A.’s determined sunshine.
But that night, you keep going back to that night, when L.A.’s radiance reemerges, a concrete bioluminescence embracing you—and you linger in this space, like treading water in a swimming pool. Time slows here, and you catch your breath, remembering and remembering and remembering.
