September 2026
Everything I Owned Was Gone: My First Night in Los Angeles
The baggage carousel had stopped moving.
One by one, the other passengers had collected their suitcases and disappeared into Los Angeles. The crowd around me became smaller until there was no one left to watch and nothing left to wait for.
My suitcase was not coming.
It was April 2013, and I had just arrived at LAX from Florida. I stood beside the silent carousel with my phone, $200 in cash and the clothes I was wearing.
That was all I had.
The airport staff told me they would look for the missing suitcase. I filled out the necessary information and waited for news. At first, I tried to believe it was only delayed. Maybe it had been placed on another flight. Maybe someone would call the next morning.
But the search seemed to take forever.
The suitcase never arrived.
To anyone else, it might have looked like lost luggage. It was inconvenient, upsetting and replaceable.
To me, it was everything I still owned.
Six months earlier, I had gone to Florida after an extremely painful divorce. My former husband had left me with almost nothing. I was already trying to understand how an entire life could disappear so quickly.
Everything I had managed to keep after that ending was packed inside one suitcase.
Clothing. Personal belongings. The remaining pieces of a life I had already been forced to leave behind.
When that suitcase disappeared, it felt as if my past had been taken from me for a second time.
Yet I had not come to Los Angeles because I wanted to look backward.
I came because I still believed in my music.
My friends had invited me to California because they wanted to help me pursue that dream. I imagined Los Angeles as a city filled with possibilities, artists and music industry connections. I believed that if I could only reach the right place and meet the right people, my voice might finally find its way into the world.
I arrived carrying that hope in one hand.
In the other, I carried nothing.
There is a particular kind of fear that comes when you realize there is no backup plan. I had no collection of possessions waiting somewhere else. I did not have enough money to replace what had been lost. There was no second suitcase and no home filled with familiar things to which I could return.
I had a phone.
I had $200.
And I had a dream that suddenly seemed much larger than the life supporting it.
But I was not completely alone.
My precious friends were waiting for me. They were the people who had encouraged me to come to Los Angeles, and when I arrived with almost nothing, they did not turn away. They gave me shelter, food and clothing. More importantly, they gave me a safe place to stand while I tried to understand what came next.
That first night held two realities at once.
I was grateful because my friends were there.
I was terrified because I had no idea how I would rebuild.
I had come to Los Angeles looking for music connections. Instead, my first challenge was far more basic. I needed clothes. I needed work. I needed stability. I needed to create a life from almost nothing while protecting the part of myself that still believed I was meant to sing.
A month later, my master’s degree in linguistics helped me find work as a translator in Corona del Mar. My employer learned about my music dream and responded with extraordinary kindness. Inspired by what I was trying to build, he bought me a new wardrobe and even gave me a keyboard.
Those gifts helped me begin again, but they could not immediately restore everything that had been lost.
A wardrobe could replace clothing.
A keyboard could give my hands somewhere to return to music.
But rebuilding a person is different from replacing the contents of a suitcase.
That process would take much longer.
Standing at LAX, I did not know about the people who would help me. I did not know where I would work, whom I would meet or how many times my courage would be tested. I could not yet see the woman I would eventually become.
All I could see was an empty carousel.
Los Angeles was supposed to be the beginning of my music story. Instead, it greeted me by removing the last physical pieces of my old life.
Perhaps that was where the real story began.
Not with an introduction.
Not with a performance.
Not with someone opening a door into the music industry.
It began with an ending I had not chosen, a suitcase that never returned and a question I was not yet ready to answer:
Who are you when everything you thought proved who you were is gone?
I thought losing my luggage was the disaster.
I did not yet understand what Los Angeles was going to ask me to lose.
Chapter Two coming next week: The Girl Inside the Suitcase.
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