prompt: serene, title: on the pedestal these words appear in "the next big thing" flash fiction

You’ll drive down from the San Fernando Valley, from the strivers and the strife, the immigrant markets with names you can’t pronounce and the white kids from the East Coast going broke for their dreams alike. Down the Four-Oh-Five, gridlock growing with every car-length traveled south, deeper into the western edges of the Los Angeles Basin. The Sepulveda Pass, the choke-point only so many vehicle widths could ever fit through, no matter how rich or poor, the great temporary equalizer, that hour trapped in traffic. Beamer and beater alike, all stuck together in the suffocating smoke of truck-exhausts and wildfire and the sickening pale-emerald glow of ten thousand billboard scams. The only democracy left to be found there.

You’ll skirt ostentatious high-rises Westside, gleaming pedestals built for no reason other than to prove that one can afford the rent, the aching desperation and fading facades of Hollywood even further east. Most of the momentary comrades you sat shoulder-to-shoulder with are headed to the airport, to get somewhere else, running off for business trips to profit off others’ hopes, running off for vacation from a place they thought they’d make their hopes come true.

You’ll not be headed to the airport, not via Century Boulevard as the GPS tells a tourist rube or the kind of fool who blindly follows robot voices. You won’t be headed to the airport using La Tijera, like an aging sharpie still clinging to their Thomas guide for navigation, either. You’re going somewhere far more lax than L.A.X. could ever hope. You are instead driving to the ocean. To where it all at last ends, the West’s final edge in every way you could ever mean it.

The horizon of Pacific blue. Boundless in every way a mortal could ever understand it. Serene in its finality. This is where Los Angeles’ curse ends. You can feel it, the terror, the writhing need to prove yourself, the grandiose fantasy, you can feel it start to fade in the baptism of an endless roiling sea. Your name in lights seems small, all the sudden, in the wake of the drowning eternal. Those Westwood condos seem mere monuments to arrogance, may as well be the crumbled statue of great Ozymandias, bragging of a permanence disproven by time’s ruination.

This will pass, of course. You’ll dry off and get back in the car and those stars will again inhabit your eyes. You’ll imagine again how goddamn great you are if you can just get a foot in the door without breaking your toes. How your memory would live forever if you could just get a break.

But there’ll be a secret part inside of you that holds onto a drop of that serenity. And when your heart breaks instead because you lived long past those dreams, a widow in black, the curse finally lifted, it’ll be there to comfort you. An azure emptiness reminding you, let it go, this too shall pass.

Last updated September 22, 2020