This past trip to Los Angeles has been my fifth (!!!), but it had been two summers since I last visited; before that, I visited three summers in a row and also came in the spring one year, and I often stayed for a month. I didn’t love Los Angeles when I spent so much time there, sleeping on a pull-out bed, sharing a room with my cousins. (As an only child, that’s a lot to ask for!)

This spring, it was a reunion, with family coming from all over: us from Vancouver, and family from Toronto, New York City, and even the Philippines. I would be seeing my grandparents for the first time in a long time, and Nate would be coming with me. It was new this time, and it had been awhile: I was ready to go back to California.

It seemed the break was what I needed to see Los Angeles in a new light. The break, and maybe also the fact that it was the first time I went on a hike in Los Angeles, and so the first time I could behold the city from within it, admire Los Angeles in all its freshly watered glory. The palette of Los Angeles has always been sunny yellow and burnt orange in my mind, and this summer was the first summer (for me) that Los Angeles has been any shade of green.

Much like how I imagine heaven to be, looking at the city of Los Angeles from above, it seems to go on forever. Sitting on the snow on Mount Seymour in Vancouver, you look out onto farmland and know that the city of Vancouver ends somewhere, but from the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles you cannot even see the water. All you can see are a cluster of tall buildings in the distance, glittering freeways, and houses and civilization leaking over the edge of the world.

Despite sharing a room with four other people, at least two of whom snored, despite sharing a single family home with four other families, despite the amount of sleep I got (not much), despite not having much of a budget to spend on anything, it was the first summer that I could see Los Angeles as beautiful.

It was also the first summer that I could see myself living in Los Angeles. I spend almost 15 hours a week on transit at home, so I could hardly imagine living in a city that is mobilized mostly by privately owned vehicles, where “30 minutes away” means 30 minutes away by the freeway. I visited UCLA this trip and it felt, oddly, like coming home; outside of spending time with my family, it was the first place in Los Angeles that felt even somewhat familiar, or close to my life in Vancouver.

Vancouver’s palette for me contains blues, grays, and greens, but if you paint my school in warmer colours, I believe you’d be painting UCLA—we share school colours, after all, cool blue and warm gold. Being among books, like in the gorgeous Powell Library, or talking about Shakespeare with an academic, that feels like home. That feels like my normal.

Despite the fact that a university is, as UBC calls itself, “a place of mind,” both UBC and UCLA are beautiful places to be, and their beauty—what I think of as the physical manifestation of excellence of thinking and knowledge—reminds me that the health and success of the mind is vitally related to the health and success of the body. Kind of related to that, I find it interesting that my favourite beautiful manmade places are quite often schools.

I have always been grateful to return home to Vancouver, and every trip affirms for me that there is no place more beautiful and that Vancouver is without a doubt my home, but for the first time, I returned to Vancouver from Los Angeles feeling a little bit… just slightly… just the tiniest bit… disenchanted. As I write this, it is sunny with a friendly breeze in Vancouver, and the sun is setting behind perfectly cottony clouds, so I have been reminded why I love Vancouver so much, but just days ago I was feeling stagnant and restless at the same time, like I had returned to reality from a place of transcendence. Like I had fallen from heaven, or like I had fallen from—as much as I had fallen for—a city of the angels.