A One-Way Trip

I began dreaming about Southern California and the City of Angels when I was an angry teenager, locked in my room, listening to punk rock music. It was the early 2000s, and my life totally sucked back then. I felt imprisoned in a village of three hundred souls in rural Northern Italy. It was definitely a great place to live if you are a farmer, a wine producer, or a hermit, but not so great if you are a rebellious 16-year-old girl who is craving adventure and freedom. Despite the picturesque landscape of the Langhe, I simply could not fit in that homogenizing provincial lifestyle. It was suffocating. The same places, the same people, the same sidelong glances over and over again. Yet locked in my room, listening to my music, I could travel with my mind.

On the other side of the world, 6,000 miles away from my tiny village in the Langhe, there was Southern California. I proudly possessed the entire discography of all my favorite bands of the time: The Offspring, from Garden Grove, Orange County; Blink-182, from Poway, San Diego County; and, of course, the Red Hot Chili Peppers from Los Angeles. I learned American English by reading the lyrics of their songs and singing along, imitating the singers’ accents. Over there, endless, misty, grey falls did not add up to teenage crises. Palm trees never shed their leaves. In every season, the sun would outshine the pain of growing up, soothing it, relieving it. Maybe a cool kid playing guitar in a punk rock band in LA would have even asked me out on an amazing first date! A nice walk at Hermosa Beach, or a cool taco place at Venice Beach? Possibly even a kiss, after a ride on the roller coaster at the Santa Monica Pier?

And there I was, ten years after, on that plane. Even if I had already traveled a lot all around Europe and North Africa, it was my very first intercontinental flight on a Boeing 747. My teenage dream was coming true. A twelve-hour flight from Paris would get me to Los Angeles. “How awesome!”, you might say. Just a small detail: it was a one-way trip. I was flying there not to visit, as a tourist, but to stay indefinitely. A grant from an important Parisian advertising company gave me the ability to develop my research project at UCLA, one of the best universities in the United States. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was leaving behind myself old Europe, a stable relationship in Paris, and my entire family in Northern Italy. All on my own. On that flight, 38,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, over the Arctic glaciers, I shed all my tears. It was a leap into the unknown. What if I had expected too much? What if Southern California did not look at all as I had pictured it? After so many years of dreaming about it, all my expectations could be shattered by an unfamiliar reality. I was terrified.

It was mid-September. I got out of LAX Bradley International Terminal right at sunset. The best possible time in Los Angeles. The cloudless, crystal-clear sky over me looked impressively huge. It had the most vivid colors I had ever seen. In the westernmost side of the celestial dome, just on the line of the horizon towards Playa del Rey and the Pacific Ocean, it was orange, almost imperceptibly transitioning to red all around the fiery ball of the sun. On the opposite end, in the direction of the 405 Freeway, the pulsing artery of the city, everything was deep blue. Between these two complementary colors, in the middle of the sky, there were all the possible shades of violet, purple, and crimson. The warm and dry Santa Ana winds were blowing from the East, ruffling my hair. Despite traffic, despite jet-leg, despite the fact that I was all alone on another continent 6,000 miles away from anyone and anything I had ever known, I sat on my own suitcases while waiting for a cab and smiled. It felt right. I breathed deeply. It just felt like home.