H is for Hayes
I moved to San Francisco in 2009 at the tail end of the recession. In defiance of 55 “Sorry, we can’t hire you’s,” flat out no’s and dead silences, I flew one-way from JFK with two suitcases full of basics. Everything else I left at my parents’ house in Connecticut. It was my tether to childhood—I could always go back home if things didn’t work out.
Lee picked me up from the airport. He didn’t have a car at the time, so he’d rented a sporty Mini Cooper. After some artful luggage stacking in the Mini’s surprisingly substantial caboose, we headed for the woods.
Highway 1 was blue in the way that non-Californians imagine California to be. Blinding, crisp and full of wind. We wound our way inland and set up camp in the shade of redwoods, perched over a creek.
By the time we returned to civilization, I had an in-person interview scheduled with a small agency. They’d hinted at things getting serious if I made the leap to the West Coast. I was in awe of this city. After months of uncertainty, walking with my heart in my mouth, I had landed. There are rare times when the universe seems open to you, when everything works out all according to plan. These moments feel so significant when you are young and can still see the thin holiness of novelty around such things. And so I was humbled, having been made to wait such a short time for the perfect job, relationship and city.
I lived with Lee for a few months while hunting for an equally perfect apartment. I expected us to fight, to get frustrated with each other for leaving dishes around or using each others’ shampoo. Though the blow up never came, I wanted to complete my life. I wanted independence, to have that normal dating relationship that Lee and I didn’t get the chance to have over my senior year. 22-year-olds were not supposed to live with their boyfriends. They were supposed to wake up early on Saturdays to go to coffee shops alone and meet up with their beaus for dinner and a movie.
It didn’t take long to find a bohemian 4-bedroom 1-bath in Hayes Valley. Even my roommates were devastatingly San Franciscan: a tennis coach, industrial designer and urban planning graduate who eventually ended up at Google.
A few days before I moved into my new apartment, I went into the bathroom at Lee’s place. My face ached with the pressure of holding back tears. It wasn’t as if we were breaking up—quite the contrary. This was supposed to be good for our relationship. Wasn’t this what I had wanted? Wasn’t this what I was supposed to do?
I lived in Hayes Valley for only six months before moving back in with Lee. Six months after that, I quit the job I’d fought so hard for, to freelance. Three years later, San Francisco and I formed a shaky armistice that I find myself forgiving only when I can smell nature and see the lights of downtown twinkling in the distance. The thing that remained was my love for a boy I met when I was eighteen years old.
It’s funny that what I saw as the biggest risk of my young life, the vector that seemed so unlikely in its extraordinariness, has been a constant all these years. I had all these notions on what independence looked like, what growing up meant. But that is the great difference between the young and the very young. When we are very young, we still rely on frameworks society has drafted out for us. We don’t have the experience to do otherwise. We parrot back shame and disbelief for unlikely stories and nod along for those who do the right and reasonable thing.
Sometimes growing up isn’t about being realistic. Sometimes growing up is understanding that unlikely fables and reasonable paths can both be stories we tell ourselves. Neither is true, and neither is a lie until we’ve walked those paths ourselves.
