Second Cities

I'm on the first full day of my second trip to San Francisco and feeling a particular sense of melancholy that I'm only now coming to understand -- the sense that nothing is ever quite as good as you remember it to be. You can never go home again, but you can also never go on vacation again.

I think I love cities the way other people love people. The first time I met San Fran, briefly, many years ago, in cookie stores and shopping centers, I felt ambivalent. I was heady with the intoxication of my distant lover New York who I was about to get serious with. I had grown out of a codependent relationship with my college town. It was comfortable but I wasn't growing, and it was a little boring. It needed me much more than I needed it.

I do miss her though.

I returned to San Francisco many years later. New York and I were in an abusive affair that had gone on for many years. When things were good, they were amazing -- New York constantly taunted me with possibility, almost magical coincidences and a sense of history and connection that could be found almost nowhere else. Ultimately though NYC also enacts a heavy cost with overcrowding, a high cost of living and an oddly paradoxical sense that nothing was permanent, no one could be counted on, that one day your favorite bagel store would become a Chase without a moment's warning.

My return to San Francisco was magical. I had come from L.A. on a 10 day trip up the coast and felt warm and welcomed. Judgment was suspended here. Cruising took the form of men and women looking at you with desire and not the NY sneer of judgment that could be interpreted as either lust or hate. No one worked a five-day week, and those that did worked from home. My affair with Seattle was forgotten. Instantly. He was a hirsute, quirky, charmingly outdoorsy lover who ultimately had very little going on underneath. San Francisco was a pansexual, polymorphously perverse rebel with a heart of gold and a love of the country and the city and equal access to both.

I laid in parks, ate pastries, and feared for my life in the Tenderloin. I ran on black sand beaches and climbed on the most spacious wall this side of Colorado. I made friends and fell in love with t-shirt shops. It was a whirlwind affair and when I left to camp in the Cascades the next day, I could barely look SeaTac in the face.

Less than sixth months later I return, ostensibly to use an expiring JetBlue frequent flyer ticket, visit a good friend and escape a glut of holiday parties. But really it's because I can't stay away. As I get off the plane the pilot says to someone waiting to get off: "There's no rush in Utopia" and I have a hard time not shouting "Amen."

Then I wake up today and try to find breakfast. I pass the Juvenile division of the police department, two or three homeless shelters, and shanties to doorways. I start to feel extraordinarily sad. I am surrounded by fancy restaurants, designer housewares stores and clever boutiques. And men and women living and dying in alleyways. I assume my sadness is caused by hunger and stop to eat.

I eat breakfast with an unsmiling Chinese waitress. My meal is all beige and costs as much as a New York brunch (although I must say the sausage gravy was amazing). Still sad, I decide to wander to the Castro. Cute boys always make me happy.

I can't help but notice the high-end underwear stores. The million pharmacies. The million and one bars. Everything except flowers and comic books has been sexualized. Desire normally sustains me and brings me joy but here I feel like it's grown out of control and gone malignant.

As I walk back to my friends apartment, I wonder what has changed and it occurs to me: First love is beautiful and magical and all you see is the good. You start a long-distance affair and look at pictures of your beloved, reminiscence on your experiences together and pray for the day you can be reunited. But it's when you come back together that your idealized image meets reality and you go from broad strokes to fine details. You have to seriously decide whether this is a face you could roll over and look at every morning. You wonder: Is this the same city I fell in love with?

I am about to go back out and try to find out.