A Little Piece Of Everyday Magic

I came to this city in love and with everything I owned stuffed into three bags — it was San Francisco, so six people in a three-bedroom apartment seemed like something that could work… I had a stack of dreary journals about heartbreak. But they were also filled with memories of the places where I loved to be in love all over this city that I thought had turned its back on me.

The Wave Organ, like San Francisco herself, is gorgeous and hard and weird. We walked out on the dirt path past the fancy yacht club to listen to the acoustics of the tides bounce off the sculpture’s concrete pipes and into our ears. After the bottles of wine were empty, we stripped down to our underwear and jumped into the bay, Alcatraz at eye level as our teeth chattered and we held each others goosebumped bodies. Her black hair was wet and matted to her forehead when we kissed, our mouths filled with the Pacific.

But after that fight, that last fight, those last few weeks, those were our best. We took photographs of each other by the ocean, by windswept pines, in bed, up late, drinking beers and waiting until it was time to part ways. It was over, but we wanted evidence. We went to all our favorite places, concrete slides, wave organs, museums, hidden bars we claimed as our own. Photographs of San Francisco that we happened to be in.

And then she was gone. Just me and my journals and the mice and the dog shit. Drinking quietly. Working job after job with no plan except to stay. To meet someone new. To drink wine with them and throw ourselves into the bay. To prove to the city that I loved her by being in love in her again.