Warner Park

Prologue

Andrew

I sat up straight in my chair, neatly stacking my script on the desk in front of me. The papers clacked against the wooden surface, in perfect sequence, in a way that soothed me. Why was it soothing? Because I was a neurotic wreck of a man, honestly.

I moved my shoulders back, rolling my neck in circular motions to loosen up. It didn't work, but I did it again anyway out of pure stubborn nerve, scratching the back of my blonde head. My knee bounced up and down as I sat in my chair. I was sitting at a long table with nothing but two chairs, two stacks of scripts, and a green screen behind me. I tried not to look in front of me at the cameras, lights, and film crew waiting to do my screen test. I knew any clips we recorded would likely never see the light of day, but it didn't matter.

I wasn't an actor, by the way, just a former high school theater nerd who ended up with a worthless Art History degree and a completely uncanny obsession with home fitness and yoga, of all things. I was born and raised in a small town no one had ever heard of outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, and I spent a lot of time bored and snowed in. For much of my adult life, my obsessions kept me sane. I traded away my serotonin levels and social skills, though. 

That's just how things were living up there.

I now primarily made a living off of instructing yoga courses, but after moving here to Los Angeles I had to pick up extra work to get by. You know, the sacrifice of deciding to move somewhere that everyone else also wanted to be. So here I was.

I wanted this gig for a few months of pay, just to continue scraping by. I'd never done anything remotely like this before, resulting in my current nerves and an alarming level of imposter syndrome.

The fact that it was being recorded made it feel too real. Real meant pressure to perfect my delivery. Pressure to perfect my delivery meant I had to admit I was worried about what others thought of me. I tried not to think about that, but it paralyzed me.

This place was supposedly called the City of Angels, but everyone I had encountered in this town so far had been anything but angelic. Los Angeles natives seemed laid back, but uninterested; happy, but resentful. Everyone I met had ultimately no concern greater than the one they carried for their own wellbeing. I felt like my experience so far had been a fluke.

There had to be more to this city. Was it just me?! I had a hard time reading people here. I knew this for a fact, because I wasn't exactly fitting in. It was probably just me...

My date two weeks ago was dinner with a guy named Eddy, a professor of neuroscience at a local university. We talked for two hours about yoga practice and the latest true crime documentary streaming on Netflix.

I couldn't believe how much we had in common. Every time our eyes locked, my heart jolted. He was practically finishing my sentences. We had a connection I had never felt before. I replayed that night over and over in my mind for days, obsessing over why he hadn't texted me back to meet up again. I couldn't shake the constant daydreaming of what his body would feel like against mine, the smell of his cologne that night, the sound of his voice laughing at my desperate jokes.

When I accidentally ran into him at the grocery store the following week, he'd forgotten my name or where he'd remembered me from. That was when I realized how skewed my reality was, simply because of where I had lived my entire life. Eddy had connections like that all the time, he had probably already moved on to someone else. I, on the other hand, was used to not going outside or interacting with people much for three months at a time. I had desperately clung on to the first person to show me any sort of warmth in this city.

I had never felt such a deep sense of being an outsider in my life. Alright, maybe coming out back in high school was bigger, but the point was the same. I felt like a fish out of water around here.