College girlhood in Los Angeles

As a young woman, living in Los Angeles these past few years has gifted me a heart full of gratitude and a pair of longing eyes that follow what shines. There’s a stark difference between the psyche I bear now and the one that belonged to the girl who had only known quiet Texas suburbs all her life. My life in Los Angeles has relentlessly rocked my heart back and forth, but I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. My time in this city has allowed me to realize my own little metaphysical world, where practicing gratitude and feeling everything unabashedly have filled my life with such rich experiences.

Two summers ago, I went to the Santa Monica airport flea market with some roommates from the apartment I was subletting at the time. Not much seemed to catch my eye other than this cheap-looking strawberry pendant. I had never been one to wear jewelry, but I do really love strawberries, and it was only $5, so I bought it. I am a very sentimental person, so obviously, this red piece of plastic dotted with golden seeds was going to mean something to me.

My life in college up until that point seemed quiet, or at least it feels that way now in hindsight. It was in that next year of college that I would go through the most harrowing friendship breakups I had ever been through, as well as a romantic situation that was a heartbreaking impossibility. Throughout those months, I started to notice that some of the seeds on my necklace had begun to fall off, one by one. Ominously, each one fell off after somebody had left my life for good. These months looked like relentless yearning for something much bigger in a twin-sized bed, crying in broad daylight at the beach listening to Frank Ocean, and trying not to cry again on the bus ride home.

The grief taught me how to find the gratitude that existed at the core of my life. Gratitude became a loving relief that I came home to, over and over again, in order to pick up the pieces and to start all over, again and again. I existed in this tender place for a long time, the one that invisibly exists between waiting and desire. I found gratitude to be concealed in this space, and it was only there that I could find the truth in everything that was happening to me. 

There are so many moments of love that have built up my experience of young womanhood in Los Angeles. These memories make up a gleaming kaleidoscope of the gratitude and beauty that have made my life so full as a girl growing up in this sprawling city. 

When I find myself sentimentally looking back on my life, I often think of Greta Gerwig’s “Lady Bird,” which has remained one of my favorite movies since my first watch in 8th grade. I love the way that the film constructs memory, and I often find myself recollecting my own memories and experiences in the exact same manner of storytelling as the film — especially when it comes to my years living in LA.

The story of Lady Bird’s senior year of high school is told in quick glimpses of what seem to be random memories of little significance. I think it is largely because of this structure that a main criticism of the film was that nothing really happened, which I wholeheartedly disagree with. 

At the very end of the film, Lady Bird looks back and realizes the weight of every moment she had lived through. Thousands of miles away from home, on the coast she relentlessly dreamt of escaping to, she thinks of the way that the streets simply just bent in Sacramento. In this infinitesimal moment, she realizes the endless love that she has for everything she has experienced in her life there. Glimpses of emotion peek into her life, and simultaneously into mine, until they all boil over and we both can look back in time with tears and a newfound appreciation for every single moment. 

As I approach the last weeks I have at UCLA, I find myself returning to these tiny, twinkling moments that are lodged in my heart. I think of the places around this sprawling city that have changed me and taught me something, guiding me along the path to become the woman I am now.

I think of the way that golden light falls perfectly between trees and paths on campus, just like it does in the pictures. UCLA’s campus is so impossibly picturesque. I think about lying on Tongva Steps and feeling a hug from the Earth below me, and from the sun above me. Sometimes, when I close my eyes and put on a particular song, it feels like I’m eighteen years old again. I look up at the trees and the sky, and the scene looks exactly the same as it did four years ago. 

Seeing a Joshua Tree makes my heart swell. I find myself reminiscing about a trip to the desert during the spring quarter of my freshman year. The car assignments put me into a car with three seniors who I thought were simply just the coolest girls I had ever met. I still think about them and what their little lives may look like now after all these years. We listened to “how i’m feeling now” by Charli xcx on the rides there and back, and every time I hear a song from that album play, I remember how lucky I felt to be driving with those girls with the windows down, and how my future felt so vast in that desert. 

I remember watching my first Gregg Araki film in the James Bridges Theater during my freshman year, “The Doom Generation.” Hearing my favorite shoegaze song in a movie soundtrack for the first time was something that opened my eyes to my true passion for film. Of course, I eventually watched all of Araki’s filmography over the years. I feel like being a Gregg Araki fan is just a requirement if one lives in LA and has a penchant for film.

I look back on sticky, sexy summers that I spent in the city. I think about my perfect LA days, the ones that I spent completely alone, listening to Addison Rae, hopping on buses across the city, vintage shopping, going to my favorite cafes, seeing a new movie, and letting myself wander everywhere until I was too tired to be out walking in my sweaty ballet flats any longer. I remember wistfully listening to the entirety of “Cupid Deluxe” by Blood Orange on the Metro line 2 as the sun set on a hot summer day. My belly was full of buttery movie theater popcorn from the Los Feliz 3 Theatre. I felt exhausted and unsure of how I would live through the rest of the days of that meandering summer, but I was just excited to take the long way home.

I think of late nights spent at my favorite bars in Chinatown and Silverlake with my favorite people and my favorite music playing. A lychee martini, a cosmo, pink mahjong tiles, “We Can’t Stop” by Miley Cyrus, Sade, and the feeling of being the youngest person at the bar.

I have become an undying patron of Urth Caffe, specifically their Ocean Park location. Starting my junior year, I began to routinely go there on solo dates when I was feeling overwhelmed by my life. I spend hours journaling about my life and enjoying my own company. I often stay past sunset, and as it gets dark, the workers place a tiny wax candle on every table, and it feels like a hug – one that I have been needing, but I won’t admit that. 

Senior year has felt like regaining my balance after feeling like a sacrificial lamb for much of 2025. I’ve been playing into the pleasure and luxurious laze of LA by frequenting Erewhon, various beaches, and ordering lots of tiny clothes from Los Angeles Apparel. I got their jelly flats a couple of months ago, because the spirit of a girl in Los Angeles is hidden within the iridescent glitter sprinkled in the shoe. I’ve been reading “Girl Insides” on Substack on Sundays like it’s the morning newspaper. I like to read about the lives of other pretty girls who wander around LA. 

I’ve been driving around Santa Monica on bright sunny mornings with my boyfriend. We frequent Layla Bagels in Ocean Park, and I stare into his sweet eyes in the sun as we eat our bagels outside. The final gift this city has given me has been him. 

Everything is rapidly fleeting now, and I don’t know where the wind is going to take me after my time is up here. I’ve been accepting the precarious nature of my life right now, and remembering how I’m the luckiest girl in the world to have been a young woman who could have ever felt so much in Los Angeles. 

I know that I’m going to be extremely emotional over these next few weeks, but I just hope to embrace the naivete that I once recklessly carried with me as that eighteen-year-old girl who first moved to this city. No seeds have fallen off my strawberry in a long time – spring is coming with a strawberry in the mouth.