I visited San Francisco for the first time the spring before I met Devin, when I spent one sunny afternoon drinking red wine on the southwest hill of Dolores Park. The grassy lawn felt limitless despite being hemmed in by Victorians and Mission architecture on all sides. The tiny single-car J Church tram rambled by, more like a toy train set than a city metro. A man in a black mesh tank top and abs that would be impressive even back in LA rollerbladed past. A heavy blue breeze rolled by with a scent that hinted at the vastness of the Pacific it came from, just a few miles to the west.
Four years later, I’m sitting on same hill under the same sun, sharing a bottle of white wine on a second date. The wine and the memories of that first visit blur my vision until I can barely separate the past from the present.
It’s another one of those sunny afternoons of the sort that makes the days spent living in the Bay Area run together like one great river of yellow watercolors. On someone’s stereo nearby, the Dua Lipa song comes on where she sings “one day you’ll love me again / hug me again ‘till the end” and I feel nausea and a lightness in my temples as my body recalls that a week ago Devin and I broke up. I feel thankful that it is so sunny because it provides both vitamin D and an excuse to wear sunglasses so big that nobody sees the tears welling up, barely provoked, in broad daylight.
The rest of this date goes well. He teaches me how to ferment plums. Add two percent of their weight in salt and leave them to rot. He assures me they turn out delicious. I think about how narrowly his plums had escaped the more common, unsalted timeline stretching out before them. The one that ends in a foul purple slime instead of on Instagram.
A man with two backpacks and a small dog wearing rainbow boots walks up and asks if we want to hear today’s menu. I wonder if the menu consists of things like drugs or things like hot dogs. I suspect the former, but my date says “No thanks” before I can ask. The city’s two dominant values, ones that start seeping into your core as soon as you sign a lease here, are a permissiveness that borders on lawlessness and a relentless capitalistic ethos. These two forces bump up against each other in sometimes delightful ways, as evidenced by the quirkiness of its drug dealers. The man nods and continues making his way up the grassy hill, the dog strutting along by his ankles. In the distance, the palm trees and the Salesforce Tower soar into the sky like steeples from churches. I take a sip of wine and close my eyes.
On my drive up Mission Street back home to my newly empty apartment, I yearn for Devin. Or, more specifically, for a future with Devin. I want to be where we were a few months ago when the assumption of love until the end remained untested. I want to be where I was four years ago, walking Mission Street for the first time, yearning for the day I would finally fall in love. Back then I didn’t know how wonderful each of those days would be and didn’t know how quickly they would all run out, one right after another, like the neon green and yellow Mission storefronts that sped by, beyond the car window, until you got on the freeway and there were no storefronts outside the window anymore, just the concrete barrier.
The two memories of this afternoon in Dolores Park and the afternoon I was nineteen in Dolores Park run together, and who I am now seems suddenly very close to who I was before. Between the two selves, there used to lie a relationship: at nineteen, I hadn’t met Devin. At twenty-four, things are already over with Devin. The partition between the two selves, the three years of our relationship, had just dissolved into nothing. The memories of our time together from those years — a trip we took to a Buddhist meditation center in the misty southwestern portion of the city, a walk we took up Van Ness in the fog towards the Opera Plaza Theater — seem decontextualized, like a dream that could have no logical relationship to the present, because in the present there is no “we”. Those memories of us together no longer fit into the linear narrative I had of our lives unfolding together on the same strip of time. That strip of time turned out to lead nowhere except back to itself, looping into a ring around an empty center.
Today I felt, in a way I hadn’t in years, the loneliness and yearning that was so central to my experience of being nineteen. I returned to where I started on that loop of time. I slid so easily back into those feelings, and the years in between when I first felt them and today seem to be nothing at all.
And then another electric blue breeze skates in from the Pacific and grazes my cheek, and those feelings are all just memories again. Eventually, I learn how to make enough room for these old feelings of loneliness so that they don’t entirely blur the palm trees in front of me and blot out the watercolor sun. I am certain that Dolores Park is spacious enough to hold all its unicyclists and rainbow-clad puppies right alongside my own ghosts and memories. I stretch out on its limitless green lawn and think of all the grassy hills I have yet to lie on.
