Chapter 20: A Certain Arrival

Five years ago I lived, for a time, in a large one-bedroom apartment on one of the most beautiful streets in the city. A half block stroll to the west and a quarter turn to the north, I could see the bright bridge rise up in the distance. Some blocks onwards and there I was, perched on a rock above the strait of the Golden Gate, watching as the bay disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. The street bordered one of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods, but more importantly it bordered — or came very close to bordering — the edge of the city itself.

One day, two weeks before my birthday, I stood in our bathroom and looked in the mirror. A change was coming, I told myself. I could feel it. And so it was that within a month my mother nearly died, and then didn’t.

The last time I had lived in San Francisco was in an even larger apartment on a smaller street in a neighborhood to the southeast, nearly on the other side of the city. The wind whipped through the valley every evening. I would stand at my back door in the kitchen and watch the plastic chairs skitter across the large deck, where fat raccoons prowled at night. I had lived alone, but I had been restless.

Almost a decade spanned my departure from that life and my arrival in the one overlooking the ocean. A busy decade. I had gone to New York, to Washington, DC, to Southern California. I had accumulated a variety of degrees. I had discovered many things that didn’t work, and very few that did. I had always had one eye on the escape hatch.

I hadn’t meant to go out and search so hard, but then, we never do.

My affair with San Francisco started from across the bay. I was very young, a teenager still, and I was in Berkeley, dancing on the grass of the marina. We arrived at 4:00 am and left at 10:00. In between those hours the sun rose behind us and lit the city in the distance. I stopped dancing long enough to watch it awaken like a sleepy lover on the first morning of a doomed romance.

As they start, so too do they continue: San Francisco and I always enjoyed each other best from a distance. I liked to live in it only if I could live close to an escape. I like to look at the city from a hill on high across the expanse of water, or to see it pass by like a silent movie through the struts of the bridge. And now, finally, I wonder if even that distance is not enough, or if maybe the distance is not even the problem at all.

Before I left Southern California and moved to that street at the end of the world, I broke up with the boyfriend I had been with for a number of years. He was five years older than I was and one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever seen.

We were uneasy creatures together — insecure, competitive. We held one another at arm’s length even as we each thought we were growing closer. I could not figure out how someone with so much could think so little of himself, until I realized he saw the same in me. It took a long time for me to understand this at all and to understand that I had arrived at the place he had been when I left.

I stood in the bathroom again, five years on, and stared at myself in the mirror. A change is coming, I told myself.

So I wrote to him from my house in Northern California across the bay from San Francisco, no longer so insecure or so competitive. I wrote to him, not from the edge of the city but the edge of a decade.

He responded, this unearthly, beautiful twin of mine, and in his understanding and own wisdom I could see, for the first time, a beautiful city shining and waiting for me across the distance. Not San Francisco, but one of my own making.