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Los Angeles is one of those cities you can't help but develop a love-hate relationship with, and this city, with its glamour and grime, changed my life in innumerable ways. 

I understand the stereotypical hate on Los Angeles - the hideous traffic that can double, nay triple, commute time if you happened to be extra unfortunate, getting more than your fair share of pollution, the slew of cliques that make socializing seem more like a jungle, the vapidity and superficiality of it all. But to loathe the city means to completely ignore the beauty you can unearth between the flaws, and aren't we all waiting for someone to find beauty underneath our imperfections?

I've been calling LA home for five years now and while I have yet to fully explore the city and all that it has to offer, I am continuously enamored with it. What with its wide array of food options, eclectic mishmash of art and culture and that feeling of being home yet having the independence to be whoever you want to be, Los Angeles is home.

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“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” ― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary 

“Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?”
 ― Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock

“He wanted to cry quietly but not for himself: for the words, so beautiful and sad, like music.”
 ― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.” ― Stephen Fry

“I like you; your eyes are full of language." [Letter to Anne Clarke, July 3, 1964.]”
 ― Anne Sexton

“We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language, coursing
beneath the quiet heaven of
your eyes which has no speech”
 ― William Carlos Williams, Paterson

“What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.” ― Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess

Music: How Come You Never Go There by Feist

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Music: Scary by Björk This Grayscale post is dedicated to people like me who are too terrified of crossroads, of loud noises, of jumping off the cliff (both metaphorically and literally), of falling in love, of committing, of letting go, of moving on, of heartbreak, of being too happy for fear that the worst is right around the corner. Here's to people like me whose butterflies in the stomach wear steel boots that trample on innards over every little thing, whose hands quiver at the thought of discomfort and changes and feeling too much. Here's to people like me who write long, run-on sentences with a series of ands because they feel too overwhelmed and are scared and anxious and exhausted. Here's to people like me, who would rather cower by the sidelines but have chosen to be brave instead because sometimes the person we're willing to risk for - whether it's someone else or ourselves - is more than worth it.