San Francisco.
Leaving this city will be so incredibly hard. Here, in these lines, how can I sum up what it was to hear the tincan rustling of the eucalyptus leaves, and walk home with their scent clinging to my pants cuffs? How can I capture the way the yellow sun fell on the whites city made up of tiny squares, laid out on hills like a miniature train set? The rumble and clacking of the trains on the streets and the clanging of the trolly cars? A city so much a city, where you can still hear the cawing of seagulls that swoop over the buildings reminding you of the nearness of the sea. Cresting a hill in the center of a city, and seeing a fragment of bridge and a wedge of the bay floating disconnected between the tall buildings of downtown. Walking the uneven, dirty sidewalks of the Western Addition, avoiding dog poop and broken glass, even as the air smells of flowers and lavender and again, always, the eucalyptus, towering over the parks and perfuming the air with their heady, urine soaked scent. Beautiful and overpowering all at once.
What is it to say goodbye to all the people you know you’ll never see again. You were just one more face in the ocean of faces that made up their background of life, as they were part of yours, and yet how connected we are to this artifice, this external stage set that we acted upon and in front of. What a terrible thing it is to have to say goodbye, to close the final chapter. It’s like reading a book that you love dearly, and not wanting to finish it—wanting so badly for it to never end, so that you turn the last page, and immediately begin touching it and leafing through again, as if there must be something more, someway to continue the journey it took you on.
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