See, at around 8:42 each morning, give or take a million languid minutes due to the horrendous congestion, Larry greets your car’s undercarriage with a thunderous hello. His friend Margaret is farther down the road, and today graces you with a slackening of your usual steering-wheel-white-knuckling as you pass leisurely over her. That morning rush hour is really quite the opposite, both because you’re crawling and because your car has already been gasping and groaning for over 60 minutes.

At 6:53, when headlights stream in the opposite direction, you encounter Alhambro: stocky, mustachioed, surly. He’s the big nemesis, the one who makes your tires recoil so far back into their sockets that you swear that tomorrow, you’ll have to circumvent his booming salutation, if only for the sake of your car.

These potholes all begin to appear as characters in the quotidian scenes of your life.

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The way you fall in love with a big city is just like you would with a face. All the scars, blemishes, bumps, growths.

The spurt of chin hair here — it’s that intrepid, dandy lion cleaving a concrete crack.

The still-pink mark above a left eyebrow in memory of a playground pole — it’s that indent in the stucco parking column where your car violently kissed it.

It’s all the pockmarks, the pores, filled in or hollowed out, pressure squeezing out the inner gunk from the plumbing below.

It’s the congestion you get as a head cold descends and the smog of the grimy streets doesn’t help. The congestion of your nasal cavities mirroring the ones on the city’s freeways, every human particle trying to move, to get out, but all are collectively stuck. We’re all stuck in traffic’s mucous membrane.

And so, as you get to know a face, waking up next to it cradled in the pillow each morning, a routine builds. You get to — and you joyously do — take in all the scars, and blemishes, and bumps, and growths. You see his face, her face, their faces, day in and day out. You look at all the people you love and all the people you miss, and you smile to yourself at how beautiful they are.

It’s the way Margo leaves you a few banana pancakes for breakfast because she was listening to that Jack Johnson tune this morning while you slumbered. The way Daniel’s eyes crinkle when he welcomes you into his circle with arms wide, enclosing you into warmth and friendship as laugh lines deepen on your faces. The way that Arielle and Jake, whom you’ve only met tonight, thread their limbs through yours stumbling home from the bar, singing We’re off to see the Wizard! on the yellow brick road that doesn’t seem so far-fetched in this bewitching hour.

You look at all these resplendent humans and at unsuspecting moments of gazing and memory, you see their own potholes. All the scars that wove the histories that are coursing through their veins. The stories. Their stories.

Through the routines of seeing these people — your people — you remember to be awake. When it’s a jungle in your apartment and the air outside is so polluted that the mountains hide, you go for a drive to escape for a little while.

You drive to go see Daniel, you drive to check in on Margo, and you’re once again stuck in the mucous membrane of city traffic. But as you trundle along, the Larrys and the Margarets and the Alhambros jostle you on the freeway, reminding you you’re still moving. Still going. Mental congestion dissipates as you get closer to your people.

These people. These potholes. They shake you awake. They get you unstuck.

And as you to fall in and fall in love with the scarred, beautiful faces around you, you fall in and fall in love with the scarred city streets. This is how you fall in love with a city. This is how you call it home.