Palm Springs, or the Ridiculous Fiction of Arrival

Dramatizing my life. Again.

Back in Los Angeles after a weekend in Palm Springs—with the foster cats, the howling Santa Ana winds, and the frozen cheesecake I’m emotionally entangled with. Not for long. In a few weeks, I’m decamping to that notorious oasis, where, in my mind, I already exist in a state of permanent late-afternoon, San Jacinto–shadowed glow.

Driving into L.A., spotting the Griffith Observatory, passing Zebulon, and finally turning onto Rowena Avenue, I felt it: a tiny tear for the city. Not the operatic unraveling I would have expected, given my latent sentimentality. Just a flicker of regret. A delicate goodbye.

Part of me has already relocated. She’s in Palm Springs, poolside, faintly indifferent, wearing something effortlessly desert-diva-esque. I, meanwhile, remain—for the time being—here in my Los Feliz apartment: underprepared, overattached to cheesecake, and entirely without a proper hotel pool-party identity. I assume these are solvable problems. A tan. A reduction in sugar. A wardrobe pivot.

I’ve begun, somewhat unnecessarily, to fictionalize this period of transition. Like a time-traveling tourist high on bennies. And yet I’ve been going to Palm Springs for ages. The first time was a road trip through the American myth with my globetrotting parents, ending in oversized margaritas at Las Casuelas Terraza. I remember the misters (very exciting to a small-town German kid) and the dubious art galleries. Many visits followed—Viceroy with its greyhound statues, the quiet luxury of the Parker—and let’s just say we were exquisitely alert, sniff-sniff.

And yet the Palm Springs I carry is less documentary than dream sequence: Liberace at the piano, Sinatra with a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, Marilyn in a one-piece in the doorway. In this version, I own a Halston gown—or at least a day dress with conviction. I order a “diet lunch” of cottage cheese and sliced tomato (a relic you used to see on menus here decades ago; I would never order it, but I always loved its existence).

Last night we watched a Dateline episode about a debonair art collector undone by a fake prince and a tech savant—a murderous group effort. He turned out to be completely broke. Naturally, I felt seen.

Because that’s precisely the energy (I thought) I brought to the Arrive Hotel pool this weekend—listening to a Bertrand Burgalat remix, deflecting questions about where I plan to buy property, embodying a certain “speculative abundance.”

I am, for now, the not-quite-broke, not-quite-queen of the desert. But I suspect I can grow into the role. The studied nonchalance, the faint suggestion of a life just out of reach, or perhaps somehow (because, who knows?) just within reach.

I will arrive. Eventually.