Alexandria is a most marvelous place, thieving, whoring, filling one's heart with buzzing confusion. Venice sends shimmers across one's days. I've visited these cities with Durrell and Roeg and others as my guides, but never have I set foot in them. After living in Chicago, Taipei, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Beijing, I have always returned to the city where I was born, where my mother lives, where I run into Nat in the library and dream of the lives that might have been.
Many of my old friends have moved. Three live near Los Angeles, one in western Massachusetts. My sister left San Francisco a couple of years ago. My father hasn't lived here for a decade.
My work is mediated through the internet -- I could be anywhere. San Francisco is expensive and I often skip a meal or two to pay my rent. And it's a saddening place for me, a futile social experiment in a time of war and hatred, a place where I'm no longer fully integrated, a bit of a backwater.
But it's the only place I've ever thought of as my home, the only place I've felt no need to defend because its existence is as much an unchangeable given as my own. I love the other places I've lived and to say I love San Francisco is not quite accurate. I am the city, maybe. Maybe that's close.
No comments:
Post a Comment