Essence

I keep catching them at stoplights and see it all over their faces. It’s become a pattern. I attribute it to some New Age recipe around the art of manifestation and what the Universe is trying to tell me – that or I’ve overextended my stay in Los Angeles. This one in particular made me uneasy with her innocence yet in the end, she caught my gaze, held it, took pity on me and moved on. They’re not easily distracted, and while they can’t discuss the art of filling a void, the nothingness you think they possess has the intellectual prowess to start a much needed conversation with yourself. Foregoing East Coast sensibility, in true Angeleno fashion, I attempted to decipher what the Universe told me through patterns as I pulled up next to a 4 year-old girl at the stoplight on Santa Monica Boulevard. Life hadn’t touched her and I felt she still had her essence, or a supreme understanding (unbeknownst to her) of what made her, her. A guiding force comparable to an urge that guides you to your joy – or who you really are. It’s beautiful to see it on them, but enough to low-key piss you off as life experience makes it difficult to extract. There’s an art to it. And I asked myself, at the start of the conversation, what did it feel like? The closest thing I can give you from my own experience is being alone, defending Gotham City in Fort Huachuca Arizona at age 4. It was the good kind of butterflies. Is creativity the driving force? I can’t place my finger on it, but you know the feeling where you’ve lost all sense of time doing what brings you joy and nothing can touch you - not even life. I wanted it again. What do I do? I looked back at the girl. She had moved on. And in pure Angeleno fashion I read into a ‘movement/behavior’ as symbolic of the overall experience - in this case closure. I asked, waited, let the first answer come to mind and then...Solitude. The acceptance of Solitude is how you get it back. Different. In the midst of wondering if I had lost it (mentally), I wondered how long that girl would be able to hold on to her essence before life happened. Hopefully she’d get it back, because I’d like to believe that this is the art of coming full circle.