SWARTHOS

The summer of 2024 in Los Angeles stretches like a cruel joke, each day a repetition of the last — dry, relentless, too bright for anyone’s good. I roam these streets, the asphalt steaming beneath my heavy boots, the skyline a jagged teeth of glass and concrete that seem to mock the world below. Each corner graced by a flickering neon sign that might well be a siren’s call, calling me to some adventure that has long since been replaced with the mundane.

The pandemic, they say, is behind us. Yet the air is thick with uncertainty. Infection rates are ticking upwards, gnawing at what little remnants of normalcy we cling to like a lifeline. Death feels more abundant than life, each face on the street a reminder of those lost, a ghost haunting the alleyways and parks I traverse with my dog. We are more than just two beings navigating this vast city; we are wanderers in a graveyard of dreams, searching for a vestige of adventure in a world that has turned stale.

My dog sniffs the remnants of what could have been — a discarded hamburger wrapper, the scent of fried food wafting lazily in the sticky summer air. It stirs something in me, a flicker of what life once promised. But like the sprawling traffic, a cacophony that rushes to nowhere, our hopes are stymied by the reality around us. Cars blare their horns, passengers trapped in a metal box, oblivious to the world passing by, much like I am in my own mind. A trash truck lumbers past, its grinding jaws voraciously swallowing the remnants of our city’s excesses, while a homeless man leans against a lamppost, eyes glazed in the sun’s lethal embrace.

And the sun! That bronze inferno hangs above like a distant tyrant, unforgiving, relentless, and omnipresent. It casts long shadows across sidewalks littered with detritus and despair, revealing the ugliness hidden in our once-vibrant city. Perhaps we’ve emerged from the pandemic, or perhaps it has merely shifted its form, lurking in the corners like the oppressive heat.

Together, my dog and I trudge onward, hoping for an early and wet Fall that will drench away this oppressive heat, quenching our thirst for a cooler existence. The forecasts promise rain, and we cling to that promise like desperate lovers. Let winter come with its cold, wet embrace; a cleansing, a rebirth, a reminder that life can, at least sometimes, regenerate from its ashes.

As we circle back home, the shadows lengthening, prophecies of storms in the air, we dream of foliage revived, our bottle-green dreams returning with the rains. There is solace in ambiguity, in nights that fall without the blaring of car horns and the fluorescent glow of streetlights. In the end, it is just the two of us against the world – searching, always searching, as the summer drags on.