I had always made myself pliable to accommodate someone else’s happiness, whether they asked me to or not. It was a reflex. Muscle memory from growing up in a house where only one person’s happiness mattered. Except that person was never happy, and so we were left feeling disappointed in ourselves. We were never doing the right things.

I was never doing the right things. And so I settled into being disappointing early on. Here, on the beach, as I walked in the near-darkness, with only an eerie green-gray light from the faraway boardwalk, I knew I was once again a disappointment. But who would be the first to say, I give up? Both of us inched toward those words, but always backed away just in time. I had undoubtedly gotten closer lately. Nodding along in our therapist’s office as Bobby told me he had been looking for apartments, his second venture into unknown territory in a matter of months. This admission was meant to scare, but I wasn’t scared anymore. Hurt that it didn’t produce the intended effect, he didn’t press the point. That had been the problem all along, I was discovering. It had come to his attention that I had stopped fighting somewhere along the way, all while I thought I was keeping a secret. I knew I eventually had hundreds of nights in empty apartment bedrooms ahead of me, so tonight I wanted to sleep in my car by the side of the Pacific.

I could hear the seagulls crying through my window. I could hear the waves crashing as I stared through my windshield at the constellations I could make out. In the rearview mirror I saw a police car driving in the slow lane as an officer trained his flashlight into the windows. I turned my car on and illuminated the NO OVERNIGHT PARKING sign a few feet away. I had to go.

As I drove home from the beach and rounded my way off the 101 Freeway and through the streets of Hollywood to home, I thought about the ghosts of previous lives I had lived in L.A. hurtling past me. Apartments I had once lived in and now wanted to forget, restaurants I had gotten into fights with other boyfriends at, places where I had not been myself at all. Each time I drove through the city, I reckoned with these past versions of myself. Versions I did not like, but that had nonetheless helped me survive at the time. It felt strange to pass through these layers of myself—the ghosts who haunted me, the memories that flooded back even when I didn’t want them to. This was the city I’d grown up in—not as a child, but as an adult. And I could not help flooding the city with my ghosts.