To San Francisco, With Love
— Julia LaSalvia
Music I Listened to While Packing:
- Postcard, First Aid Kit
- Dog Years, Maggie Rogers
- Body, Léon
- Ivy, Frank Ocean
- Them Changes, Thundercat
- Gypsy, Fleetwood Mac
- Slow Burn, Kacey Musgraves
I moved to San Francisco shortly after graduation. During the last few months of college, two distinct groups emerge — the people who know what they’re going to do and the ones who have mild panic attacks triggered by the question: “So, what’s next for you?”
When I moved back in with my parents after school, I had a real “oh fuck” moment: it suddenly dawned on me that I had no plan. Most of my friends had already strategized their next move — there was med school, law school, consulting gigs, flashy tech jobs, euro-trips disguised as self-discovery gap years. I had a vague interest in writing and politics, but I didn’t really see much for me in terms of a career trajectory.
When I moved back home to Boston, I immediately began applying for every job that seemed entry level (read: attainable) for someone right out of college. I was open to moving to any city, but a lot of my college friends lived in San Francisco and there was also a potential budding post-college romance there.
I visited San Francisco for a week that summer and stayed with who would eventually become my now-ex-boyfriend. He was living in the kitchen of a tiny apartment in the Marina and working at what we would later find out was a slightly shady start-up. We awkwardly held hands in Dolores Park (in that this-is-new-and-kind-of-weird-but-I-like-it-way), snuck wine into the Kabuki theater in Japantown, and took pictures of each other at Twin Peaks; everything felt brighter to me in San Francisco.
When I flew back to Boston, I cried on the plane ride home. Suddenly I had the direction I was looking for. I needed to move there.
Somebody loved me in San Francisco.
One of the perks of not knowing what you want to do is that everything is a potential opportunity. When a friend contacted me about a technical recruiting job, I didn’t necessarily feel passionate about it, but it was a job and moving out of my parents house was a step in a direction (progress is progress, okay?!), so I took it.
Over the next few years, I fell in love in and with San Francisco — the strange dichotomy between the ancient railway-style apartments, their boarded up fireplaces, and all of my Ikea furniture, smoking jays while walking down Haight street, the winding outdoor staircases that seemingly led to nowhere, the thick layers of fog that added an eerie quality to what would otherwise be a relatively mundane sunny day.
And a lot of changes happened over those years after college too — I quit jobs, started new ones, got my heart broken, grew it back again, and I felt like I was slowly starting to figure out the things that mattered to me (writing things like this and playing with my friends’ cats, mostly). And with all of that something I didn’t expect happened. I started to feel suffocated by the city that I once really loved. Like a relationship that’s slowly and painfully losing it’s spark (cue: Slow Dancing in a Burning Room by John Mayer), the things I used to love the most about San Francisco didn’t feel as exciting to me anymore.
I couldn’t shake this nagging gut feeling that I was beginning to stunt my own growth by staying. And because I’m really bad at ending phases and saying goodbye, I let it drag out, in large part because there are so many things I will really miss about San Francisco.
It was the ideal city for my, somewhat bumbling, transition into adulthood. And I hope to never lose the softness, the progressive and forward-looking mindset, the openness to occasional psychedelic drug-use (amongst good friends and in a safe space, of course), and the important motto: “always wear layers,” which I think we can all agree is deeper than the weather; it’s a state of mind, people.
San Francisco, you will always be more than just “a place I lived for a few years.” You were my first real home. You deserve more than a breakup text or an abrupt departure without a goodbye. You gave me my greatest friends, some of my happiest memories, and most importantly, you made me feel deeply accepted and gave me the space to grow and figure things out. You will always have a piece of my heart, but right now I need to see what else is out there.
And hey, if we’re both single in five years, maybe we can work something out.
Love,
Julia
