Once upon a time, a man moved from Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, to Los Angeles, the city of every man for himself. Elliott is a doctor; he's attractive, well-educated, and a gifted conversationalist. He met Julie through JDate, the leading network for Jewish singles on the web. They went on several dates and soon Elliott was regularly spending the night at her place. He liked Julie. They were getting close and Elliott was imagining a bright future.

Then, it happened—as it often does in Los Angeles—he bumped into her at a party over Halloween weekend and she totally blew him off. She sent him a text message apologizing the next morning. That was the last Elliott heard from her.

What happened? I call it the glitter Louboutins syndrome. You've seen them—those red-soled, glitter pumps that are so shiny you can't quite look away. You know you have nothing to wear them with and nowhere to wear them to, but you can't stop trying them on, thinking, well, maybe with that dress—no. Not with that dress. And you know it. Oh, but they're so pretty. Yes, they are. But are you going to make the $600 investment?

Let's try them on one more time?

It's only a matter of time before you see the gray suede ruffled booties—and who cares if they're $1,050? Just looking at them you can think of at least eight outfits that were made for these shoes and at least twice that many occasions to show them off.

So off you go, strutting in the new Manolos, the glitter pumps forgotten in a corner of Neiman's.

I'm not suggesting men are accessories—I'm saying people are all gorgeous in their own way, but not always suited to us. We understand this instinctively, and that's why we hesitate about making the time and energy investments in some cases, while we jump head-first without feeling like we need to assess the cost in others.

CASTING CALL

Here, the options are endless. We're all here chasing dreams, and most of us have scripts already written out for everything, from our careers to our lovers. Like a casting director, we'll go through hundreds, if not thousands, of people looking for the right fit. Usually it happens at lightning speed, names and faces meshing together so no one even has a name anymore, or a number, but some descriptive moniker, like, “The Fetus,” for the really young guy you had a hot one-nighter with, or “The Venice Bum,” for that unmentionable tequila-soaked weekend on the beach.

And every once in a while, you have a glitter pumps situation that drags out for months. These situations are particularly jarring, because they bring you face-to-face with your point of origin (because hardly anyone who lives in Los Angeles is from Los Angeles) and you'll remember, briefly but painfully, that people are not disposable, that this isn't a casting call, but real life. You'll think about that guy who used you and left you high and dry in high school and send an apologetic text message to the guy you stood up last night and resolve to do things the right way, only to forget about it again when the door of you apartment opens and you find yourself once again in the veritable candy store of possibilities.

This is the Los Angeles emotional hit and run. We've all done it.

MEANING

Andy came to Los Angeles from Nebraska. As is customary, he was immediately invited to a party, and this is where he met the women who would become his future roommates, Simone and Ana. Andy was a great roommate—he immediately filled their bachelorette pad with fresh fruit and vegetables and showed them how to make banana-spinach shakes. He had a dream of opening a little juice bar one day.

The first time Andy saw Simone naked, he thought he'd died and gone to heaven. He'll learn, I thought, as I followed Simone into the bathroom with a camera and stretched out on the floor so I could shoot her angles and curves from a different perspective. There was no particular reason for this or any of our video or photo shoots, just the fact that she's beautiful and generally naked, and I'm always holding a recording device of some kind.

In Los Angeles, the things that usually mean something elsewhere don't mean anything—until they're supposed to mean something. The problem with this is that no one really knows what the hell is real and what isn't, what means something and what doesn't, until our so-called movie is over and the critics have had their say.

THE BOXES

Los Angeles is the city where people come to chase their dreams—that's what you think, anyway, when you arrive. Give yourself a few months and you'll begin realizing this city that shatters more dreams than it will ever make happen.

And nowhere is this more painfully illustrated than in our streets.

“You know the box,” wrote Mark Groubert in a heart-breaking piece for the LA Weekly earlier this year. “The box that’s left by folks who are not moving to another place in Los Angeles, but home. Home to Wallace, Idaho, or Quincy, Illinois. Home to Greenville, Alabama, or Ardmore, Oklahoma. Small-town America. The places where dreams are born. The box is the stuff that can’t fit in the back of the U-Haul. The box is the life being left behind. It is the box of broken dreams.”

The town, with its box-lined streets turns one into a sort of disillusioned illusionist. The dream is paramount. The dream, of course, is all about you. There's very little space for anything or anyone else in a dream that's just yours. But you're still casting.

That joke about us being closest when we smash into each other's cars in some accident is true—even naked we're never as close as we are when something jolts the plotline.

THE SCRIPTS

I saw Andy the other day. It's been over a year since he got here and he doesn't make shakes anymore. Now he's obsessed with affiliate marketing on the web and striking it rich fast. When Simone struts naked into the living room that morning, he doesn't look up from his Mac.

“Andyyyyy,” she whines. “Why isn't he texting me back?”

He sighs and explains to her, still fixated on his screen, that Simone doesn't really like this guy and he doesn't really like her. They've had this conversation a hundred times. That's his script. Simone's script is to call me hysterically from the 405 after work later that day and rant about the douche who isn't texting her back.

In a week, she'll call me and tell me she's back with her ex-boyfriend from five years ago. Then it will be this Canadian guy she's marrying so he can have a greencard and they can pitch a reality show idea. Then it will be a producer for a show on one of the animal channels. We'll take turns waxing poetic about men and love and how useless it is to hope, or how we're over hoping, all the while perpetuating our own hit and runs with other people. That's our script.

TALE OF TWO CITIES

So Elliott texts me again lamenting about how weak and vulnerable he feels. I'm with a guy I'm into whom we'll call Charles and he's getting annoyed at the barrage of texts I'm sending and receiving. I wonder whether I should try to explain Elliott's situation, but I don't know where to start. Charles, who's not from Los Angeles, refuses to follow any script, which makes me nervous.

Finally, I explain and Charles tells me about a friend of his in a similarly hopeless situation, then wonders out loud why people are so stupid. He says it in that way New Yorkers have of emotionally shoving you like you've come to a stop in the middle of the station and are in their way.

“They're stupid because they're in love,” I respond, and it sounds like a street carpeted in jacaranda blossoms with pot stores on every corner. Upon saying this, I am overcome with sadness, a gross kind of maudlin tinged with a little envy.

Charles says that's not love. Earlier I'd asked him if he thought love could conquer all and he said no. But I hadn't asked him what he thought love was.

I imagine life in Los Angeles and life in Manhattan side by side. One is the script for a feature film and the other is a five-year plan. One employs frequent searches on IMDB and its social network profiles are filled with headshots instead of candids. The other is LinkedIn and bylines, and selects based on credentials—what do you do? Where did you go to school? Who do you know?

One is built to imitate dreams and has complete character arcs and a few endings in mind before it begins. The other is founded on a definitive goal and depends on people's commitment to it.

I wonder, suddenly, if I make Charles nervous because I hate long-term plans but remain perpetually typecast. He keeps telling me all the reasons we could never date, but his reasons aren't my reasons. And all the while we're holding hands.

Elliott texts me again asking if he should call Julie. Amid my cute comparisons of two cities, I feel raw and cracked open. I start crying and I hide in Charles' chest because that's not really a part of my arc and when he pulls my face to his, Charles is confused because there are no tears on it anymore.

“Don't call her,” I say when I respond to Elliott's text message later that night. “Go to the gym.”

When Charles kisses me good bye, the kiss feels like he's already skipped three spaces ahead on his planner and isn't quite here anymore. I stand watching him go, horrified at the anticlimactic end to the scene.

Then I wonder what music should have played during the last exchange. Then I feel ridiculous for thinking about this and reach deep for my heart, only to find a spec in desperate need of a punch-up.

FADE OUT.

THE END

BLOGGIE TREATS (FROM AROUND L.A.)

Mina writes about her Halloween threesome at Longing's End: “There came a point when Sylvanus disappeared and I had assumed he was prepping our bedroom. Only when he emerged again and I looked at him, I knew he was not ok and I asked him and he confirmed he was not. I immediately left Vic to join Sylvanus in our bedroom. Sylvanus was concerned and expressed that he was feeling left out. He was watching me do things with Vic that I was not doing with him. I told him I was sorry and the only reason why our foreplay was taking so long was not because I desired it to, but because I refused to take the hand of another man and lead him into our bedroom.”

In Worthwhile Version 2.0, Jennifer talks about her own scripts and movie screen endings: “There is something to be said about an unforced, unguided, natural affair. So rarely we find those that connect with us on such a level. It is as disheartening as it is uplifting when it happens. We saw “Beginning of the End” together. How ironic that it seems that may have just been what it was. How I wish it wasn’t.”

Melissa Jun Rowley writes a spectacular ode to this city in L.A. Love Affair:

At the end of the day, L.A.…
You’re still the basin of all my aspirations,
the stream of consciousness that keeps the wine
in my blood flowing,
the waterfall that cascades
“This May be Love” so says Jimi “like one of those daydreaming fools.”

Deep in the Valley where all your hopes surfaced
born of beauty,
born of pain,
living in a
transitory semblance of real life
you revealed yourself to me.

L.A.…
elusive, magical and bruised, you’re the line that runs down my center,
keeping me close to the edge of surrender…