Blackberry Spring

We are well into the month of March. My twenty-ninth birthday has come and gone. The air warmed just enough for the first blooms of spring to arrive, and then, just as quickly, it turned cold again.

A blackberry spring.

I’ve been grieving Los Angeles lately. I go back to twenty-one, to a life that felt as vibrant as anything I could have ever imagined. I think about the people I met, the sights I saw, how it felt to stand in a place that once felt mythical to me - but there I was, in the middle of it all.

I go back all the time.

It’s not the studio backlots, or the film premieres, or even the Golden Globes I revisit.

Instead, I drive north on PCH to that little seafood shack on the side of the road in Malibu, tearing into crab legs, drowning in butter, surrounded by bikers and surfers and sand. She sits across from me. Freckles and a cold coke. We’re untouchable.

But Los Angeles is behind me. I try to make peace with that. And sometimes, I really believe it.

And then something shifts, and I don’t, and it all comes flooding in.

Is that my curse? Just when I think I’m moving forward, the past comes back for me.

Am I forever cursed to a blackberry spring?