Ramblings from San Francisco

It takes a lot to know a city, to REALLY know it. During a late night beer with friends outside the neighborhood laundromat/café/bar, I felt no closer to San Francisco after a month of living here. Too soon. I imagined myself sitting in Union Square on a late spring evening, and the thought alone transported me back to a home I know and love. I would close my eyes, and send little feelers to all parts of the city, and know it, understand it. The sound of traffic would blend into these thoughts, flow with these little feelers, and travel to all the places I've ever been in New York to grab a piece of the memory for when I'm sitting outside the laundromat/café/bar listening to a live band play unfamiliar music in an unfamiliar city.

The move was uneventful. It rained early that morning we left New York, and I rode the car to the airport mostly in silence. The big moments never hit me as much as I expect them to. They never have as much of an impact as the movies, television, or the media tell me they should. When my dad first told me my grandmother had passed away when I was eight, I immediately burst into tears, not because I was overcome with grief and surprise, but because I thought that that would be the most appropriate response. With age, I realize that big occurrences don't elicit an explosion of emotion from me; they are more like a slow burn that finally becomes unbearable, so I let it out one way or another. Watching the neighborhood fly by in the rain, I only felt like I was going to come back someday. The tender memories of all the good times didn't flood (until now), and letting go at that moment seemed easy.

I recently read an article on solitary confinement that elucidated its effects and the amount of time it takes for these effects to manifest. People need social contact, a quality I did not appreciate or believe when I was young. At one point, I wanted to live in an oceanside cabin in Maine with cats, and books, by myself for the rest of my life as an ideal retirement scenario. I thought that that would be enough. Though I won't be confined, I wonder how long it would have taken me to become psychotic with just cats, trees, literature, and the ocean to keep me company. I find myself craving interaction here. On quiet days when the dog is just not enough of an eloquent companion, there is a palpable need to reach out and make contact with someone. Not that just anybody will do, no no. I'm a beggar, and yet, I'm still a chooser. I often crave communication with my old friends, old bosom friends who have remained bosomy, who provide manifold dimensions to their conversations, not just gossip and trivial shit. The time difference is a wrinkle I haven't yet ironed out, so for most of the days, I pine after friends I miss who aren't even available.

A good friend of mine suggested poetry during times when I'm lacking inspiration, and it's worked. A few years back, I would periodically take down The Treasury of English Poetry, or any collection of T. S. Eliot's, and go to the game room where there was the largest window, so I could sit looking out onto Massachusetts Avenue and read verses that I could never write. There was a calmness in the cadences, and even though I only whispered them, I felt a kinship with the words coming from my mouth, like with prayer (I don't pray), or meditation. There is beauty in feeling lost, and there is value in looking backwards, though I have been taught that those two things are fruitless and futile. It is precisely the ability to feel a wealth of emotions that produces art, and without that sensitivity to all the different facets of life, there would be no great art. Sometimes, it seems like a bad joke to be one who feels so keenly everything that passes through one's life, but other times, it seems like a blessing to be able to glean significant moments out of the pile of mundanities that keep on coming, day after day, month after month, year after year.

With a tome of sad verses (what good poetry is happy?) in my hands, I give myself full permission to indulge in a period of mourning. I mourn the life I left behind in New York: the crisp mornings, the lovely neighborhoods, the people whose distinct flavor and jadedness I miss terribly, the friendships, the apartment, my block, the trees, the parks, the subways, the life that could have been, the supermarkets, the restaurants, the sidewalks, the memories from all the nooks of benches once sat upon, and from all the crannies of places, people, and things that made up who I am. And I am here now, meeting generic people, because I giving away only my generic self. "Hello, how are you? Doing well, enjoying the weather." I mourn the friends whom I've known better elsewhere, but who are here now. The spectre of a better friendship, long dead, gives me hope at the same time it keeps me down. Wishing to resurrect a time in our lives that has already passed us all by is also futile, but the yearning is still in me. The changes that have come over us during the years apart, I am not ready to face theirs, or to reveal my own. This sudden reintroduction leaves me still trying to reconcile that things are different, not just on hiatus. I don't think I was ever done mourning what I had lost, so this second round of mourning is a lot. The poetry helps, though.