Something not mine to begin with

Everyone takes pictures of the red heart.

I don’t.

It’s there — loud and shameless, stamped onto the concrete like it owns the corner of Olive and Santa Monica. And still, I keep moving. I don’t stop. Not once.

I pass it on my way to the gym, on my way to work, on my way back when the light hits wrong and the city feels like it’s watching. Twice a day, sometimes more.

And I never take a picture.

Not because I’m above it. Not because I don’t care.

A quiet defiance, maybe. A refusal to turn everything into proof. A stubborn belief that some things lose their magic the moment you try to frame them.

That heart doesn’t ask to be seen. It’s already there — bleeding red in the middle of it all.

Right at that corner, the palms shoot straight up like they’re afraid to lean. Young trees. Decorative. New to the neighborhood.

They haven’t bent yet — not like the old ones in Hollywood do, the ones that remember things.

These palms are stiff and polished, like everything else around here. Pretty, performative, trying too hard to stand tall.

But that heart?

It leans.

And I think maybe I do, too. Just not enough to stop.

Too young.

They were planted to decorate the sidewalks, not to survive them.

In older parts of the city — real Hollywood, the kind with ghosts and cracked glamour — the palms sway with wind, yes, but also with memory. They lean a little, even when there’s no breeze. Bent by time. By years of standing through heat and shouting and everything that’s happened beneath them. Those trees are part of the story.

But here, in West Hollywood, the palms are new. Tall but rigid, dressed up like set pieces. As if someone told them to grow fast and act the part. And they do — they point straight toward the sky, unapologetically vertical, like they’re being tested on thier ability to greet the passeersby. Like they think permanence is about height, not history.

They don’t know how to hold weight yet.

And maybe that’s why the red heart stands out even more here.

Because it feels old. Not in the literal sense — the paint is probably no more than a few years faded — but in the way it marks the ground like someone once felt something so loudly they had to make it visible. Not pretty. Just real.

It’s the only thing at that corner that doesn’t feel like it’s trying to impress anyone.

Everyone else takes pictures of it — they frame it beneath those perfect, plastic-souled trees and pretend they’ve discovered something hidden. They don’t see how loud they’re being.

But me? I just keep walking.

Because the heart feels like it belongs to a different city. One that remembers. One that bends with time. One that understands that real love — or longing, or pain, or whatever it was that made someone paint it — doesn’t need to be documented to matter.

It just needs to last.

But me? I just keep walking.

Because no one else does.

Because everyone stops — mid-step, mid-conversation, mid-life — to crouch and frame it, to center their foot or their coffee or their lover in the shot, to look down and then immediately up, checking the angle. As if by noticing it, they’ve made it matter.

And so I walk.

I walk past it with the full force of indifference, as if that indifference has weight, has meaning, has consequence.

As if by not looking, I’m saying something louder than they ever could.

As if the red heart, quietly sun-cracked and fading at the edges, will somehow notice my restraint — will catch the absence of my gaze and reward me for it.

Like it will slyly swell with jealousy, just a little, glisten a touch brighter for the next passerby, whisper: he never looked, but he knew.

It’s ridiculous, I know.

To think that withholding attention is a kind of offering. That refusal is reverence. That the heart could feel spurned, and therefore loved.

But I’ve always done that. Pulled away to prove that I felt more. That my silence was depth, not absence. That my looking away was not apathy, but intimacy.

As if the less I give, the more it means.

As if restraint could immortalize the moment better than any photograph ever could.

I convince myself that by not capturing it, I keep it alive. That I don’t flatten it into pixels or likes or algorithms. That the heart stays real if I don’t reduce it.

That it stays mine.

But again — it’s not mine. It never was.

It belongs to the sidewalk.

The streets!

To the city.

To everyone who ever crossed that intersection and made it part of their story, even if only for a second.

I keep walking, not because I’m above it, but because I want to believe that choosing not to engage makes me different.

And maybe it does.

But if anyone, just to me. Not the heart.

The heart does not change.