I want to talk about the experience of visiting a ghost town. Not a town void of humans or human activity, but rather a place that exists and operates as a ghost on an individual level. If you’ve ever called a place “home”, and if you’ve ever felt a sense of belonging and community in that place, then that place would have been actually alive. Once you stop calling a place “home” - either because you move away or no longer feel a sense of belonging and community, that places dies in your brain, yet still exists physically. Hence, Ghost Town.

I have a few Ghost Towns under my belt, but what was really different about my most recent Ghost Town experience was that this was the place I still called home whilst I lived in temporary other homes. I always came back to go home, to the thing that I belonged to. Now, I belong to nothing there. It’s eerie too, driving past a house that was once yours; a house that you would wake up to and fall asleep to. Now, if I tried to fall asleep in that house, I would get arrested for breaking and entering. I do not belong to it and it does not belong to me.

I really felt like I was going home the other day. It felt like LA was just a temporary fever dream, and that I would go back to Berkeley with my Birkenstocks and political aggression. I would go to Timeless Coffee down the street and walk to class. I would go back to normal.

I’m fixated on places that no longer are but still continue for someone else. Ghost Towns are simultaneously destroyed and reborn. Like Magic.