remembering a past life through google maps

i'm on google maps.  look close.  i'm famous

Tonight I find myself using google maps street view to look at our last apartment in Los Angeles.  I travel down Los Feliz boulevard as if I was in a car and take a left had turn down Hillhurst avenue, I stop back track and decide to take the back way to Hillhurst via Rowena. I stop to ponder how truly amazing this technology is.  When I was a child I had this fantasy that I would wake up one morning to find that the world was frozen in place, everyone except me, and I would spend the day exploring everything go where ever I wanted and never having to worry about what people were thinking about me.  This is about as close to that fantasy as I could imagine.

This is a whole world frozen in various moments in time, I can go anywhere completely unseen and everyone around me is frozen.  People stand forever walking their dog, cars wait at stop signs infinitely, lovers sit at restaurant tables eternally existing only in that moment.  Unlike photographs which capture only a fraction of a moment in a world, google street view is like actually revisiting a place where I can virtually walk down a street and stop look around me and continue on.

 I am awestruck by how incredible this technology is until I begin to wonder what exactly is wrong with me.  Why am I spending my Wednesday night sitting on the computer virtually revisiting the place I formally lived?  I walked and drove these streets every single day and yet I never stopped to admire them.  Through google I just sit and stare at buildings I never gave two thoughts about before but now I ponder about the people that live there.  How is it that not being there causes me to think more about something than being there and experiencing it?

I travel down the road to Vermont Avenue and the Los Feliz 3 cinema where I question if it was really necessary to blur out the faces on the bill boards as well?  I go one door further down to Skylight Books and at any moment I feel that I could just walk right through my screen onto the street and into the store.  It then occurs to me that in this world it is daylight all the time, there is no night, there is no sleep.  Just as this illusion begins to fall apart I turn down Franklin Avenue and travel west, I move at a rate that almost feels like I’m driving down the street in my car.  I pass the House of Pies, Gelson’s, the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, Birds, and then I turn left onto Tamarind Avenue.  I pull up next to the yellow stucco building look up to the unit at the top right and there I am standing in the window.

I know it’s me because the table on the balcony and the pathetic looking lemon tree in the corner are mine, the figure in the window is not Jaime, it has to be me.  The illusion is broken because that was me in that moment but now here I am sitting on my computer looking at me through the window like some perverted voyeur spying on myself.

Did I make a mistake leaving?  When I was in LA I spent the entire time reminiscing about Seattle, I surrounded myself with objects that reminded me of home.  Now that I’ve moved home I find myself reminiscing about LA, surrounding myself with things that remind me of that place and that moment frozen in time.  Will I ever be able to live somewhere and simply be there without thinking of somewhere else?