In 2026, I lost several people who mattered deeply to me. The year seemed determined to make a procession of loss. One was a dear friend who had blogged faithfully since 2009; returning to the form is my way of meeting them again in a place they loved and never quite left. So, here I am. I suppose I should probably begin with the headline: I am London-bound for graduate school. There was an image circulating on Bluesky of a woman delivering what I can only assume was a college lecture. Behind her, a projector offered this invaluable piece of academic guidance: “The greatest research skill you can have is being a nosy bitch”—or something to that effect. Historian Kevin M. Kruse quote-posted it as a succinct answer to the apparently eternal question, “Why should I major in history?” You must be a deeply unwell level of nosy bitch to uproot your entire life and pursue a graduate degree in history at my age. Or maybe not. After a lifetime spent racing against the clock and marinating in existential dread, devoting one minuscule stretch of it to nosing through the past may be the furthest thing from indulgence. It may instead be a long-overdue reprieve from the relentless demand to keep advancing toward the next socially sanctioned measure of financial success. Graduate school is not, generally speaking, where one will wander off in pursuit of wealth accumulation. Anyway, I chose the flight with the shortest layover and booked it before I could reconsider. The moment the receipt landed in my inbox, I had a full-blown panic attack. I called the single father who raised me. This was the same man who came to this country knowing not a word of English. He worked as a janitor in Pico and eventually became a licensed mechanic. He had built a life from almost nothing, and now I was calling him in terror because I had purchased a plane ticket. I felt ashamed. It was not London I feared, though. The prospect of a new home excited me, even if I had spent my entire adult life practicing a kind of self-serious geographical monogamy. I mean, Los Angeles does tend to inspire a peculiar kind of devotion. California is less a place than a pathology in American popular music, for example. “This place will be the end of me,” The Weeknd lamented in “Escape From LA.” Lana Del Rey called California “just a state of mind,” then made it the setting for an entire oeuvre of doomed Americana. The Red Hot Chili Peppers imagined “Californication” as a sickness, a cultural disease wrapped in seductive mythology exported to the yearning masses. All of it is so unnecessarily dramatic, really. Is it California or is it the cocaine? No one is particularly invested in establishing causation. But Joni Mitchell made it through Paris, Greece, and Spain before every foreign landscape clarified the same desire: for California to take her back exactly as she was; I suspect one gray London morning too many will have me graduating from her wistful longing to the more ominously desperate refrain of “California Dreamin’.” Then again, probably not. The colder and darker, the better. I wish I could say they were all crazy and that California was simply a place like any other, a place where you can get the best Mexican food of your life for a tenner, but unfortunately, I would be telling a half-truth. As it happened, I named this blog after The Doors’ “L.A. Woman.” Jim Morrison rendered the city and the woman almost indistinguishable from one another. He left Los Angeles for Paris soon after recording the song, in fact. Before I knew I would follow him across the Atlantic, I had apparently chosen a journal title with an inconvenient talent for prophecy. Now I was the titular L.A. woman myself: solitary, feverish, possibly lost, and preparing to leave for Europe, wondering what would remain of the woman once the L.A. was taken out of her. Sure, I was a smidgen anxious. But, again, it was not London I feared. No—the fear ran much deeper than that. London represented what frightened me most: the finality of becoming one person at the expense of every other I might have been. I would arrive as a woman of infinite possibility and leave with a new noun attached to me: historian. The title would tell me what my devotion had made of me, but not what that same devotion might have made of me elsewhere. Who would I have become had I chosen Ireland over England? What different self might Scotland have drawn out of me? You may keep a different hierarchy of horror. In mine, this ranked first. I literally cannot think of anything more terrifying than being this fragile, ephemeral creature confined to one body, one place in history, and a single irreversible passage through time. Every choice is another door closed. In choosing one country, I abandon another. In loving one person, I forfeit all the people I might have loved instead. Becoming one version of myself would require burying every other possible version. People call this commitment, maturity, or simply life. I experience it as a kind of mutilation. I can feel the phantom limb of every life I did not choose. I suppose all I can do is give every unlived life a proper elegy without diminishing the one I chose. So I will get on that plane.