Between Cities: A Brooklyn Writer in LA, Still Looking East

I was in Echo Park last week when someone asked where I'm from. I said Brooklyn without hesitation, then caught myself — I've been out here four years. Long enough that the answer should be more complicated. Long enough that 'from' and 'live' aren't the same word anymore.

She nodded like she got it. Said she was from Chicago originally, been in LA six years, still introduces herself the same way. We stood there for a second doing that thing people do when they recognize the specific displacement of someone who moved cities but didn't move on.

I've been thinking about that exchange all week.

What it means to carry a place inside you long after you've stopped waking up there. What Brooklyn still holds that LA can't touch. What LA gave me that Brooklyn never could.

The Geography of Becoming

LA taught me space. Not just physical — though that too, the way a city built horizontally rather than vertically changes how you move through a day. But the internal kind. The permission to be undefined for a while. To not have a fixed route or a fixed identity or the weight of everyone who knew you before watching you try to become something different.

Every corner had a memory or an opinion or someone who remembered a version of me I was trying to outgrow. That's the cost of being known — you can't experiment quietly. You can't reinvent without witnesses.

Out here, nobody knows what I used to be. That freedom has been clarifying in ways I didn't expect.

But there's a loneliness in it too.

I was reading Hanif Abdurraqib recently — the way he writes about cities as living archives, how a block can hold ten years of your life in a single intersection. That landed differently this time. And those are not the same experience.

What the Block Still Holds

I flew back last month. Just for a few days. Landed at JFK, took the train into the city the way I always did, watched the skyline come into view through the window. That specific moment — the one where you see the buildings and something in your chest does a thing — still hits.

I walked through Crown Heights. Past the bodega on the corner that's been four different bodegas in my lifetime but still feels like the same bodega. Past the church where we used to sit on the steps. Past the tree we used to climb.

The tree is gone now. Cut down. Stump smoothed over. Nobody I asked knew when or why.

I stood there longer than I meant to. Not grieving exactly — just registering. The way you register that a version of the past you thought was preserved somewhere actually isn't. That memory does all the preserving and memory is unreliable and eventually even the landmarks you use to orient yourself disappear.

Someone walked past and said my name. I didn't recognize him immediately. He reminded me — we knew each other in high school, used to take the same train. He asked what I'd been up to. I told him I'd been in LA. He nodded like that made sense, like he'd assumed I'd left years ago and was just now getting confirmation.

'You back for good?' he asked.

I said I didn't know yet.

That was the honest answer.

The Work That Holds Me

There's a session in the work I built — the Wound, the one about the version of yourself you're trying to heal — that keeps coming up for me when I think about all this. Not as theory. As something I'm actually sitting with.

Because the truth is I left Brooklyn before I was ready to leave. Not geographically — I was ready for that. But emotionally. I left carrying things I hadn't named yet. Patterns I hadn't interrupted. A version of love I thought was the only kind that existed because it was the only kind I'd ever seen modeled.

LA didn't fix that. But the distance gave me room to see it.

And now I'm in this strange in-between — not fully here, not fully there, trying to figure out what it means to honor where you're from without being defined by it. What it means to build a life somewhere new without erasing the one that made you.

James Baldwin wrote about this better than I ever could. The price of the ticket. The cost of leaving and the cost of staying and how both debts follow you regardless of which one you choose.

I think about that a lot.

What Comes Next

I don't have a clean ending for this. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you I've figured out where home is or what I'm building or how long I'm staying in either city.

The truth is I'm still working it out. Still carrying Brooklyn in my cadence and my references and the way I move through a room. Still learning what LA has to teach me about space and stillness and starting over.

Still a Brooklyn writer. Just one who lives mostly in LA now. Figuring out what that means one flight at a time.

If any of this resonates — the distance, the carrying, the trying to figure out who you are when you're no longer where you became yourself — the work that's been helping me sit with all of it is at the Gregory Mitchell Experience. It's where I put everything I've learned about untangling the patterns we inherit and building the ones we actually want.