It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the summer of leaving, it was the summer of sending down roots; it was days of work and nights of attending housewarming parties where we knew two other people and spent the rest of the time introducing ourselves as so-and-so’s friend or friend of a friend. The fire alarm went off and water poured through the lights and the hallway was dark for days. We missed the 1 and chased down the 27. I lost track of the number of people I cajoled to follow me from Chinatown back to my apartment, huffing and puffing as I promised the walk was just a bit longer, this next street isn’t that steep.
The scallions in the cup by the window regrew, though the water we left them in had turned a cloudy peach color from the slowly liquefying roots. We cooked a few, but because we hadn’t re-potted them in soil they came out flavorless.
We knew better, yet each of us threw up in the bathroom toilet once. The fog rolled in and I learned the names of the green spaces closest to me: Washington Square, Portsmouth, Lafayette. Plans for seven people spiraled into fifteen, squeezing ourselves around the low-lying tables in the back room of Rose Indian Cuisine. The boy I was dating got his car windshield smashed after spending the night, and for the next two months, I rode the Caltrain down to Mountain View out of guilt.
Outside this city, everyone wants to ask me about the crime and the big box retailers closing, and I just want to tell them about the view from Grandview Park: the way the road extends into the fog as if to delineate between Here and Elsewhere. My first pupusa, oozing with cheese. Cutting work early to go to Li Po Lounge, where the mai tais were strong and the cell service was nonexistent. I’d talk about the bubble machine at the corner of Larkin and Sacramento, and how in my last weeks, as I lugged my packages to UPS to send cross country, I would choose one bubble to follow with my eyes, holding my breath until it popped.
Back in college, a friend said I’d be the one most likely to have an affair because of what a hopeless romantic I was. I see it in my patterns of dreaming; I reach for a different place when I’m in the middle of my current one. Hemingway wrote, “Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan.” In San Francisco, I started writing more about Texas, and now here I am, a week into Boston, processing San Francisco. My nose tickles and I remember my allergies acting up for the first time in years because of the superbloom, all the wildflowers blanketing the hills. I know the names of more plants now: California flannelbush, wild fennel, bear’s breeches, strawberry trees (not to be confused with actual strawberries). I identify a plant here that I’ve seen growing on that other coast, like catching wind of a fragrance and recalling a lover’s perfume.
In my favorite Matt Nathanson song, he warns: Love, no one cares / about the stories they’re not in. Maybe the only story to be told is that we were young, and it was the start of everything.