During all hours dazed men trampled over soiled sheets wielding rusted machetes in throbbing hands; weaving through the crowds under horror film nights, playing the villain in their own personal inferno.

The Hollywood we knew was a fire-tinged mirage that not even the non-native palm tree could sell.

We needed to clear our heads. And so, the idea for a trip was born.

We had left everything in pursuit of an idea or an ideal really. Like most New Yorkers holed up in our wintry caves, we were bedazzled by the promise of light, warmth, and space. We craved the California of Instagram dreams. On paper Los Angeles was the perfect place to settle. What we didn’t expect, naively, was the daily contention with a brutalist desert sun come to pop holes in what had become the dry hulls of our hope.

Four months in and close to sunk, we made for the mountains of Lake Tahoe. What we found was something quite unusual and exceedingly welcome.

We no longer wanted to forget.

Instead, we wanted to remember our seasons here. We wanted to savor those moments, the joyful and pain-filled ones alike, that reminded us of what we hold dear. That our future lay beyond the grip of a society whose currency is legitimized and traded on a meaningless system of blue-checks. And how a cross-county blunder can sometimes be the just the thing you need.