lotuses
the last place i could imagine a lotus blooming is in echo park lake, surrounded by concrete and stifled in car exhaust.
yet they do, every year for as long as i can remember, and undoubtedly for years before that.
their arrival shouldn’t take me by surprise, but every year it does.
i’ll be driving downtown, navigating an ecosystem of erratic pedestrians and vehicles, drowning in an internalized expanse of transgressions and mistakes, organizing and reorganizing the day’s to-do list in my mind.
then there they are.
for a beautiful moment, los angeles freezes in the heat of summer. glendale boulevard yields to broad green leaves and blush-kissed petals, dancing gently just above the water’s surface and below the downtown skyline.
it sounds like the gimmicky narration of a hollywood love story, and a hollywood love story it is, but no script or scene could capture the way i feel when the lotuses take me by surprise.
rose-colored glasses can’t hold a candle to lotus-colored glasses.