falling in love in an empty theater

Prologue

There were two thoughts that crossed my mind when I stepped off the flight.

The first was that my life had irreversibly changed the moment my feet hit the Los Angeles soil: two-thousand, seven-hundred and nine miles from where I've lived for the past twenty-four years. I'd always say that I would move to LA, one day - but for the first time, I realized that I finally made it out of the two-star town I'd cursed since the day I turned eighteen.

The second was that I shouldn't have had those six Jack and Cokes on the plane.

Between semesters, I could always be found lounging poolside with a margarita stuck to my lips. The heat didn't affect me - if anything, it made me thirstier. I thrived in the sunshine, but the blazing temperature of California was of a different caliber than Pennsylvania. I suppose I could say that my third thought that day was to find the ladies' room, so that I didn't lose my meager lunch of whiskey and caffeine on a reality star (whose dry-cleaning bill would be more than I'd earn in a year at my new job) and get black-listed.

And so, on a lovely Tuesday afternoon, I found myself on the wrong side of the country, wearing an unseasonably warm sweater that had been suited for the weather in Philadelphia that morning, pushing my way through the crowd in an airport I'd only ever seen in movies.

Drunk.

The experience was surreal, and, if I was being honest, exactly what I would have expected from myself. Although, it turned out that I wasn't as good at navigating while intoxicated as I had previously thought, resulting in a taste of the City of Angels in a way that was less than pleasant. In clearer terms, I tripped over my only pair of heels - the ones my mom bought me for graduation - and landed face first on the LAX floor.

There was an upside to my misadventure, however, and it was that I already knew where to find the emergency room in my new city. And, better yet, I managed to avoid the traffic with the convenience of an ambulance.

One broken nose and a few hours later, I decided that I was going to love Los Angeles.