Nomas

by S. M. Keats. Photograph by Mikayla J. Yurman, found here.

I arrive in LA with my dad. My room looks cute and the house is a beautiful vintage craftsman. I pair my socks with the plate I choose to eat my breakfast on. I don’t cry when my dad leaves, even though I thought I would. I don’t often see my roommates, but they seem friendly. It honestly feels like I am living alone. The couple in the room two away from mine left chocolate covered strawberries to share. I start reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, because a girl on the internet says that it changed her life. My friend Cal’s roommate Billy borrowed it from the library at the Quaker meeting in Pasadena. I never finish it and I forget to give it back.

…

I have my show opening at a gallery in Silverlake. It is a pain to get to Silverlake because it takes a bus and a metro and a 45 minute walk. It’s hot and I don’t want to do it. I am not very patient. I do it anyway and it is actually fine. The show brings in way more people than expected. I didn’t even know half of the people there. I saw people from college and I felt popular and well-liked. I was really happy when my friends who I met online showed up. My friend Rain flew down from NorCal and I was also very excited to see her again. I kept telling everyone I was going to work at an escape room. I feel bad that my attention is so divided. I feel like kind of an asshole.

…

I have an interview at the escape room. It is a bespoke escape room. This is the second interview with them. I know they only hire artists, so I try to look the part as best as possible. I wear brown cargo pants that my mom got me from Target two years ago, and a slightly cropped black turtleneck, also recommended to me from a girl on the internet. I wait outside a warehouse for 15 minutes. The person interviewing me is late. I am not intimidated by them because they are nonbinary. There is also a man here, with a tiny dog. The warehouse has dim lights and I am sweating through my polyester shirt. They kept saying they only hire artists, but they never once ask to see what I make. I could’ve been lying about being an artist. I could’ve made the worst art they have ever seen. All that mattered to them was that I looked like one, and knew the art-speak lingo. The hours are 10pm-2am.

“You seem like a really good cultural fit….. We love that you make weird stuff about psychics and clowns…. But….. it doesn't seem like you actually care…. About escape rooms….”

They let me come and try out the escape room. I bring my friends. It would’ve been $264 for all of us to do it, but I get to take them for free. I feel a bit like I am going to vomit the whole time. The thing about this escape room is that there is someone watching you do it the whole time, and if you get stuck they tell you the answers. We get stuck nearly constantly, which makes me feel like an idiot. 

They never contacted me after I did the escape room. 

…

I don’t really know what to do with my time. I walk around aimlessly for a couple hours a day usually, and sometimes follow behind people for miles to see where people are going. I watch the old people eating lunch at the Koreatown Galleria.

…

Ever since January 1st, when I stopped taking my mood stabilizers, my stomach has been hurting after every meal. I don’t know why. I spend a lot of time in my room crying.

I cry for 4 hours a day, pretty much every day. I hate that I only feel beautiful when I am crying. I start getting a weird vibe from my roommate, but everyone tells me it's probably fine. I call my mom approximately 6 times a day.

…

My stomach aches are still occurring. I schedule a zoom appointment with a doctor in Texas, which I do from Green’s car after eating an 18 dollar egg sandwich. I don’t know why every sandwich in LA has to be so expensive. The doctor is 45 minutes late and tells me I need to stop eating these foods: 

I pretty much eat only toast and oatmeal and sugar.

…

I spend a lot of time on craigslist looking for jobs. I find a job as a baker at a pie shop. It seems cute and idyllic, a black-owned business. I read the reviews and everyone says the pies are good but the guy who runs the shop is a jerk. I decide to go anyway because I really need a job.

It turns out, he is a jerk. He calls me names and he puts his hands on me and the other guy working there, Al. We work in complete silence. I am sweaty and sticky and tired and anxious. I hate getting yelled at. I have lost the social capital that comes with being a student, with feeling respected. It feels like people will treat you like less than nothing here. 

I take the bus usually, but I prefer to walk places if I can. The bus is unreliable. I kept finding myself having very public breakdowns on the sidewalk. I felt invisible.

…

I go to the Bendix building downtown with my friends. It’s a performance art piece where people are doing basically whatever they want to. Everyone is on shrooms and some people are naked. A guy untied my shoelaces. I was uncomfortable. I am trying to be more accepting of the human form. I am celibate because I am weird and shy. Almost everyone there is white. I look out onto the street below. They don’t even know all this stuff is happening right now.

…

I went to a concert featuring my friend Cal’s friend Green. We are dressed as wizards because we are planning to go to my friend Sunny’s wizard-themed album release party. We show up late and leave early and I kind of just listen to other people’s conversations. I feel bad that I didn’t really feel like socializing. I think it is ok to just absorb things sometimes though. At both the performance art thing and this, I think it is ok to exist on the outside, not everything needs my contribution. I slept over at my friend Green’s house. This is a different Green than the one I mentioned earlier.
…

I toured a 6.5 million dollar house with my friends Zen, Poe, Jen, and Rain. I don’t remember how we decided to do that activity. I was really tired but was very intrigued by the people who lived in the house. They looked crazy to me. There was a makeshift room set up for surgical procedures, I think they rented out a back room to a woman who does BBLs.

…

I can’t stop crying. I don’t know why I am crying so much. I was sleeping over at other people’s houses for the past week, because people were kind of worried about me. I refused to get help because I was scared of being hospitalized like I was in high school. 
…

When I felt stable enough to go back to my house, Cal helped me with meal prep. We made three elaborate dishes. My roommate came down and started yelling at me. He said I spent too much time in the house. I hadn’t been there for a week. He said it was better before I moved in, that he hears when I have panic attacks and he listens to the conversations I have with my friends in my room. He threatens to call the cops on me and have me hospitalized. He has an anger in his eyes, I am extremely scared. I ask Zen if I can stay over at her house. She says yes, and invites me to a comedy show where each comedian does a set and then sits down with the host and has a philosophical conversation. The comedian she is friends with swears he met me before, but I know for a fact he didn’t. 

…

I would often find myself in Silverlake, or Echo Park, or Eagle Rock, as the only black person at any event I was at. Then I would go back to Ktown and see a guy smoking crack while I waited for the bus.

…

I went to Joshua Tree with Zen, Poe, and Eden who I had never met before. It was a contemplative trip.

I couldn’t find another place to move into. Every lead for a job I had was a bust. I stayed with Zen another couple nights, before I decided to call it quits. I felt really embarrassed. I spent all this time building up to my move to Los Angeles. I told my whole family, my parents told all their coworkers, but it just seemed like I wasn’t supposed to be there. It felt like the city was chewing me up and spitting me out. My plane ticket home was 5 dollars and 60 cents. I don’t know how my dad was able to get it to be that cheap. He is really good with airline points.

…

My last week in LA felt like a breath of fresh air. I was sleeping at Cal’s. I go to art museums and bookstores, eat overpriced bagels, and eavesdrop on people writing their screenplays at Cafe de Leche on York. Everything seems really fake and stupid. The colors seem more vivid, I sit in one spot for hours and hours and hours just thinking about what has happened. It didn’t feel like my life, it didn’t feel like it had happened to me. I guess it’s not that bad. Everyone kept telling me that it would be great fodder for my art. I don’t want people to just feel bad for me or be weird about it. I do feel kinda bad that I was very imposing on the people close to me. The whole thing was just a badly written comedy.