She Was Waiting in the Hollywood Sign

I didn’t mean to hike to the Hollywood sign.

I’d meant to take a nap. Or maybe cry in the Rite Aid parking lot. But I missed the turn on Franklin and just kept driving—windows down, radio off, the city grinding like a slow migraine in the distance. My body was on autopilot, but something deeper was steering. And when I hit the last legal parking spot at the edge of Beachwood Canyon, I cut the engine and sat still.

The sun leaned low and swollen behind me. It was late enough that the light had gone that dusty gold LA is famous for—too beautiful to feel real, too smog-soft to feel clean. I stared up the hill, at those letters, crisp and ridiculous and holy.

HOLLYWOOD

A word that once meant magic. A word that now felt like a punchline.

I hadn’t planned to climb. But my boots were in the backseat, still streaked with Joshua Tree dirt, and I figured: why not?

There was no one waiting for me. No one to check the time. No one who’d notice if I came back changed—or didn’t come back at all. I pulled my hair into a knot that didn’t hold, shrugged on the faded hoodie from a college I never finished, and started walking.

The trail was steeper than I remembered. Gravel slipped underfoot. I kept my hands in my pockets even when I stumbled. Let the sweat sting my eyes. Let the city fall away behind me like noise shedding its skin.

I was so tired. Not the kind sleep could touch. Tired in my bones. Tired in my name. The kind of tired where every text feels like a request for your soul in increments:

Hey, can you cover this shift?

Hey, are you around to talk?

Hey, just checking in, you good?

I was not good.

So I walked. Past the signs warning of rattlesnakes and trespassing fines. Past the tourists with tiny dogs and the locals jogging like the world hadn’t ended. I walked until the air turned thinner, quieter, full of eucalyptus and regret.

At the top, the sign towered above me, massive and peeling at the edges. Up close, the letters don’t feel iconic. They feel old. Hollow. Like bleached bones of some ancient creature the city buried and decided to worship.

I stood in the shadow of the second “O,” heart rattling in my chest like a marble in a cup. I reached out, without knowing why.

And that’s when I saw it.

A seam. Hairline-thin.

A panel, right at the base of the letter, where no panel should be.

It clicked open with the gentlest pressure.

Behind it: fog.

Light.

A hallway glowing gold and humming low, like the last note of a song you forgot you loved.

The air that spilled out was warm and sweet, like jasmine tea and old film reels.

I didn’t hesitate. I stepped inside.

And the door shut behind me without a sound.

The hallway narrowed, then widened, then folded in on itself like breath. I walked slowly, hand brushing the wall, though there was nothing to touch—just light, thick and golden, curling at my ankles like fog and memory. The air was warm, but not heavy. It smelled like honeysuckle. Like citrus blossoms. Like summer, if summer were a secret.

When I stepped out, the world shifted.

LA was still there, but it was… softened. Tilted slightly off-axis, like someone had dialed the saturation up and the noise down.

The sky looked hand-painted. A dozen shades of velvet pink and watercolor blue, the kind you only see in old postcards or dreams that won’t let go.

Downtown shimmered in the distance, the buildings taller than I remembered—but quieter, too, as if they breathed instead of buzzed. No helicopters. No traffic. The city stretched beneath me, wide and slow and strangely still, like a sleeping animal that trusted me not to wake it.

The roads had turned to green. Long paths lined with soft grass and blooming jacarandas, the sidewalks scattered with petals like confetti left behind by someone else’s celebration.

And the people? They didn’t rush. They moved like dancers—no choreography, just ease. Like the city had exhaled and they’d learned how to live inside that breath.

Everything pulsed faintly. Lights blinked not in neon, but in warmth. Murals shimmered on the sides of buildings and seemed to turn their faces as I passed. One looked like a girl I almost used to be.

I took a step forward. My shadow followed, but slower than it should have, like it was still deciding whether to belong to me here.

The hum of the door behind me faded.

And I realized:

No one had seen me arrive.

But the city knew me.

And it was waiting.

I walked without knowing where I was going.

But everything pulled at me—gently. Like the city had become a tide, and I was just another thing it carried.

The sky above was soft as silk. Pink edged in lavender, like the inside of a seashell. Somewhere in the distance, a wind chime sang in a language I didn’t know but almost remembered.

The buildings were familiar, but softened.

The Trader Joe’s on Hyperion was now a flower co-op.

The Starbucks on Sunset had become a poetry café with mismatched chairs and a hammock strung between the lampposts.

The murals moved when I looked at them. One showed a girl holding a match to her own shadow. When I blinked, she was smiling instead. Her hands full of poppies. Her body outlined in gold leaf.

Wildflowers spilled out of sidewalk cracks and tangled up telephone poles. Bright, brave things. Poppies. Mariposa lilies. Lupine. The kinds that bloom where they’re not supposed to. The kinds that don’t apologize for it.

No one rushed. People strolled like the air was made of honey. Like they trusted time to wait for them. Like no one here had ever been made to hustle just to survive.

That’s when I saw it.

A poster stapled to a telephone pole. Weathered at the corners. A pale blue paper with scrawled ink that shimmered ever so slightly in the changing light.

Poetry Reading – 7PM

Featuring: Missy Matchstick

Back by resonance & demand..

Her name. My name.

Except it looked different here. Softer. Braver. Like it had been said with love more times than with urgency.

There was a sketch of me on it—me, but not me.

Hair longer. Shoulders looser. A tattoo at my collarbone I’d never had the guts to get.

And below it, a hand-drawn map. Leading to a bungalow tucked in a pocket of silver hills. I followed it.

The house was exactly where the map said it would be.

White stucco. A red door shaped like a smile. Bougainvillea crawling over every edge like it had secrets to tell. Chimes in the window. A pair of roller skates on the porch. A dog sleeping in the sun, her ears twitching in dreams.

I didn’t knock. I knew no one would answer.

Inside: light. Warm and alive and unapologetic.

Poems on the wall, taped and scribbled and half-finished. Paint-stained dishes in the sink. Books stacked sideways. Crystals on the windowsill, catching afternoon light like it was something sacred. The smell of palo santo and citrus peels. A record spinning softly even though no one had placed the needle. I found my name again—carved into the back of a chair. A journal with my handwriting. Pages full of half-thoughts and full feelings.

A life I never lived.

But that had always been waiting for me anyway.

I stepped back outside.

The air was thick with perfume—jasmine, warm stone, hibiscus kissed by the sun. Even the breeze seemed curated. Softer somehow, like someone had taken all the sharp edges off LA and decided to let it love people again.

The palm trees weren’t just tall—they were graceful. Dappled gold light fell through their fronds in shifting patterns, like a dance only the city knew. Their trunks looked smoother here. Less blistered. Less tired.

People walked. Not just out of necessity, but in that lazy, honeyed way—barefoot or in roller skates, sipping iced tea, laughing like the world had never broken their ribs from the inside. A man strummed a guitar on the corner of what used to be Melrose. A kid was painting stars on the sidewalk with glitter and purpose. Even the stray cats looked like they had jobs to do.

Everything shimmered. And not in a fake, influencer-filter way. This wasn’t curated. It was cultivated. Loved into being.

I heard her before I saw her.

That laugh. Low, rich, soft at the edges—like it had cracked open a thousand times and been sewn back together with rose thread.

I turned.

She was leaning against the porch rail, barefoot, coffee cup in hand, wearing a button-down I’d never seen before but somehow knew she’d worn for years. Her hair was braided loose. There was paint on her wrists. A smudge of charcoal on her cheek.

And her eyes—God.

She looked at me like I was inevitable.

Like I’d always been coming home to her.

“You’re early,” she said, in a voice that made my knees forget how to breathe.

“I—” My mouth forgot how to sentence. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

She just smiled. “You don’t have to explain. You’re here.”

Her fingers brushed mine and the contact was electric, but not loud. More like a hum. Like something clicking into place. Like we’d touched before, in every version of time except the one I remembered.

I followed her into the house again, this time slower. Not as a stranger. As someone returning to a memory I hadn’t made yet.

We moved through rooms like light through lace.

She pointed out the studio—canvas-lined walls, a garden through the window, an unfinished portrait of me that made my throat close.

“You always sit with your hands like that when you’re thinking,” she said, tracing a line on the painting. “I never forget.”

“I don’t remember,” I whispered.

She didn’t answer. Just kissed the corner of my mouth like she was saying it’s okay in a language only we spoke.

Later, she made me lemon verbena tea in a chipped mug covered in stickers. We sat on the porch, shoulder to shoulder, watching the sky shift like spilled ink—coral to mauve to lavender-gray.

In this city, everything breathed. The trees. The sidewalk. Even the space between our bodies. It felt like the world had made room for softness. For queerness. For becoming.

She took my hand.

“You don’t have to stay,” she said, as the sun dipped low and the dog snored softly at our feet. “But if you do… I already wrote you into every poem.”

It was the bathroom. Of all places.

Not the gallery wall of poetry, not the velvet chair by the window, not even the shoebox of old love letters tucked beneath the bed with my name on every envelope.

The mirror did it.

I’d only stepped in to wash the paint from my hands, still sticky with color from tracing the city’s murals with her. My fingertips smelled like wild sage and lemon rinds. The water ran warm. Familiar. I was starting to forget how anything else had ever felt.

Then I looked up.

And she was there.

Not her. Not my lover.

Me.

But not me.

Me with soft eyes and brighter skin.

Me with laugh lines that meant something.

Me with a gold ring on her pinky and a constellation of ink smudges trailing across her forearm like freckles made of poems.

She wasn’t tired. Not in the way I was.

She carried something else. A weight, maybe—but one that came from living, not surviving.

She blinked at me. And I blinked back.

And I realized I hadn’t aged here.

Not one second.

But this version of me had. Gracefully. Radiantly.

She’d made a thousand choices I hadn’t.

And they’d loved her for it.

My throat closed like a fist.

My fingers trembled on the sink’s porcelain lip.

Behind me—us—the house glowed like a memory that hadn’t been lost. The tea kettle was singing. My name echoed down the hallway, wrapped in her voice.

The dog barked once, then sighed.

And still, I stared.

Because it hit me then—this was the life I would have lived if I had chosen something other than the shoulds.

If I’d let myself follow the ache instead of the obligation.

If I hadn’t given every piece of myself to everyone else first.

This version of me had burned out, too. I could see it in the tired gleam tucked into her left eye. But she had burned for something. Not away.

She had turned the ashes into art.

A wind picked up outside. A warm, lilac-laced breeze that tasted like the edge of possibility.

I touched the mirror.

She did too.

And in that single, golden-flicker instant, I understood:

This wasn’t just a dream.

This was a fork in time.

This was a door, not a detour.

This was the place where choosing meant everything.

And the city—the version of LA that held queer joy and wildflowers and women who kissed like promises—was waiting for me to decide.

I woke to sunlight painted across the floor in soft gold stripes. The house was quiet, except for the hum. Low. Gentle. Familiar.

The door was open. Not the front one, not the porch—the door. The one in the back hallway, half-hidden behind the coat rack and a curtain of trailing ivy. It glowed again. The same soft light. That same pull. Like the sound of your own name spoken by someone who really sees you.

I stood in the kitchen.

One hand wrapped around a chipped mug with faded constellations and a sticker that said "poetry is rebellion with good lighting". I didn’t remember buying it. But it fit my fingers like it had always been mine.

My lover shifted in the other room.

I could hear her sigh in her sleep.

The dog thumped its tail once, then stilled again.

I took a sip of the coffee. It tasted like cardamom and citrus and the version of me who had stopped apologizing for wanting more.

The hum got louder.

Not insistent—just there. Waiting.

I walked to the door.

The air shimmered in the frame, just like before.

Beyond it: the hallway of golden fog.

Beyond that: I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

I stood there, barefoot on cool tile, caught between two heartbeats of a life.

I didn’t move.

But something shifted.