My love, forgive me my long silence. My last letter was still deeply rooted in and tainted by COVID-19, but it’s a different world now, once again. Every day it emerges as a newborn and unknown entity, although this reads more idyllic and pure than reality has it. The human story is constantly being rewritten through severe political polarization, distorted media representation and pandemic afterlife, where we discovered that many of our umbilical cords to the past have been cut. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes for less familiar surroundings. An umbrella AI, embraced by many, inoculates everything, while no one knows exactly what it does anymore and what the consequences of its dominion will be. Humanity’s social structures are fragmented and drifting more than ever; detached from traditional values and conventional wisdom we no longer know what to be or what to do, driving people to yearn for the old ways. Like a fluid mirage above scorching desert sands, the world shifts ever more rapidly, and all we can do is ride its wave.

In this unhinged time, your daughters and I have started a new chapter, or rather, a new book in our life. Mirroring the state of world, I uprooted our family because the illusion of certainty, security and control frightens and deceives us less every day.

This next step is blazing and new like the California sun, and because of its brightness, we had trouble seeing it, at first. As our eyes get accustomed to the light, a picture slowly emerges but we can’t quite make sense of it yet. New friends and plans need to be made, but a wealth of opportunities and unfamiliar mores froze us into anxious indecision for a while.

The foundation for this continental relocation is the spark of an idea that originated during the talks you and I had about future plans. Yes, we contemplated this possibility before you left us: moving to Los Angeles to let the children experience American high school life. We were a good team for adventures, and I sometimes imagine how different this one would have been with you by my side. Our picture would have been so much less fragile, less like a teetering crystal statue struggling to stay upright in a storm. My apprehensive doubts about whether it was the right thing to do, taking our kids away once again from everything they know and love, wouldn’t have had such an asphyxiating hold on me.

A lifetime ago I made Los Angeles my home for the first time, and this hard-to-summarize city then worked itself into my genetic makeup and heart. Settling here posed its challenges for me then too, for sure, but a relocation like this, with the sole responsibility for the happiness of one’s teenagers is on another level entirely. A vicious guilt lurks behind every academic obstacle and snub by a new-fangled friend. Every single disappointment takes on the hue of gratuitous pain and unhappiness, even though I know that high-school relationships are by definition minefields, and that creating your own life for the first time after leaving the guiding hand of school behind, is daunting and takes time wherever you are.

Finding affordable furniture was a hurdle I hadn’t counted on; the last time I moved to LA, I gathered my entire domestic outfit at thrift stores for a couple of hundred bucks. But the identity of Los Angeles as one of the most expensive cities in the world has percolated to the secondhand stores, and a dresser at the Salvation Army Thrift Store tends to be more expensive than the ones at Ikea. So instead of filling our house with quirky and semi-antique furniture, I found myself a grateful customer at the Burbank branch of the Swedish corporation and made our living room resemble the pictures in their catalogues to a t.

We are familiarizing ourselves with new dangers too. Earthquakes are a part of life, even though we hardly ever notice them. But the city warns its residents whenever a substantial shaking is to be expected or happening by sending an alarm through the covert channels of Google. Honestly, the fact that they made their way into my phone, without me giving any kind of prior consent, scared me more than the seismic activity itself. The first two times we were advised to PROTECT YOURSELF, TAKE COVER!, I felt more than a tinge of panic and dragged the kids out of bed to make them stand outside, braving the chilly morning air in their pajamas, awaiting the great collapse of our condo-complex. No one else in our building even opened their front door. After making a fool of myself the second time, enduring the disgruntled faces of my very unconcerned but annoyed daughters I quickly unlearned that habit.

Guns are real here. With some regularity, we receive notifications from Leone’s school, Palihigh, informing us parents about firearms safety, and a friend of Robin casually mentioned that his family probably owns about one hundred guns. Confounded, I asked him “why?”, but he couldn’t present me with a satisfactory answer, and in his amused shrug I thought I detected a hint of pride.

The city’s kaleidoscopic personality offers us not only disconcerting surprises and experiences, of course. Nature is almost everywhere, and we are very lucky to be only a five minute walk removed from the entrance to a national park where coyotes, mountain lions, humming birds, and rattle snakes roam. The Pacific ocean is nothing like our Balearic sea, but the wildlife it harbors is abundant, glimpses of which are offered at regular intervals. Pelicans are the most visible, but it’s not rare to discover dolphins and sea lions breaking the surface of the excellent surf waves with their heads and fins. And unlike the Posidonia in the mediterranean sea, the kelp forests are thriving, of which there is plenty of evidence to be found on the otherwise very clean beaches, and to be felt around your legs when you venture into the cold water.

As a magnet for creative people, LA’s energy is inspiring and exciting and can make you end up at afterparties of artists where you befriend members of fairly well-known bands, and although Los Angeles, like the rest of the world, has changed, the quality that made me fall in love with the city is still very much here. If you look in the right places, of course, and I concede that those are a bit harder to find nowadays, because of the rise of what I call ‘the online plague’. More than in Europe, Americans have learned to live their lives in the digital realm. Meetings, get-togethers and classes are mostly offered in a remote environment, and Amazon is not so slowly taking over the entire spectrum of the retail industry, resulting in the disappearance of shopping walhallas such as Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. The faces of empty stores are spreading like a disease.

As you know, we are great Halloween devotees. Here, celebrating it can be done weeks before the actual date in a wide variety of venues and manners, and I can assure you we did. Pumpkin patches, a double feature with the classic horror movies “The Black Cat” and “The Raven” at Quentin Tarantino’s old-fashioned cinema, dressing up with friends for a high school Halloween bash, embarking on a haunted hayride and attending seances in the fictitious village of Midnight Falls in Griffith Park, and to top it off: a Halloween party in downtown LA at the Teragram Ballroom. Roaming Universal Studios with its spooky and gory mazes reminded us of our own haunted house, which we created in the cellar of our beautifully gothic house Overbeek in October of 2018. Now more than ever do we realize how good and special that was, for so many different reasons, and castigate ourselves for perhaps not having relished it as much as we should have.  All three of us have developed a strong and sometimes distracting sense of nostalgia.

The relocation of our oddball but adorable Jazz cat was an added headache I had not counted on. Like with most things in retrospect, I can joke about it now, but at the time the red tape labyrinth was exasperating. Not the first time this notion came to me, I did once again realize what an insane amount of time, and therefore, life, we humans lose because of paperwork in order to legitimize ourselves, our possessions and even our loved ones. Surely there must be a better way to organize a society, without us drowning in registrations, fiscal paperwork, travel documents. Migrating birds or butterflies don’t need to prove they are allowed to fly south during winter.

Anyway, because of our kitty’s genotype, one of his ancestors is a serval, we had to go through the procedures required to import a wild and protected animal. To complicate matters, Leone and I were already in Los Angeles, and I had to catch the tiny time frame in which the correct Dutch authorities could be contacted (before 8 AM PST). On top of everything, our Savannah tomcat escaped from your parents’ house and got lost a few days before his scheduled transport. Thanks to Robin, your mother, the neighbor and other caring people, after more than a week Jazzy boy was found roaming the subway station of the Bijlmer meowing and trying to get the attention of sympathetic humans.

When he finally arrived in the USA, I had to collect him at some depressing warehouse, where he was held like a piece of cargo. Once again I was asked to present a ton of paperwork before they accepted me as his legal owner and importer. Jazz was not happy, he had been in his travel bench for days. Why put him through all this, you might wonder, and honestly, I did too at times. We could’ve easily found him a temporary home in the Netherlands. But you know, he’s part of our family, he belongs with us, more than any animal we were lucky to call our companion previously. Perhaps that’s because he was born the morning you passed away. I like to think that in him, we have a little bit of you still.