Hello, San Francisco

The feeling when the sunlight flickers across your face, your eyes closed, the heat and warmth of the sun’s rays permeating your being. That is San Francisco to me.

It was a short and beautiful trip, giving me a taste of a land I had never before visited. My mom and I flew in, over the mountains, the houses suddenly appearing on the face of the mountain sides, the city of San Francisco carved out of the landscape. Carved into the landscape. It felt so liberating to hug the coastline, to smell the water, to sense the possibilities latent in the land.

We arrived at our hotel, a cute old building that exuded old world charm. Our room was on the smaller side, as city hotel rooms often are, and we had to take a little old fashioned elevator up to reach it. We looked out over Union Square, lit up with palm trees bedecked in festive twinkle lights. As we settled in with snacks and diet coke, relaxing after a long day’s journey, the sound of jazz music and cable cars poured in the window, infusing our own little room, our own little world, with the sounds of San Francisco.

After I completed my teaching certification test, and experienced an edifying journey back to my hotel on an inner-city bus, we headed to Fisherman’s Wharf. I was glad my mom had overridden my request to stay at the Wharf; it was cheesey and noisy and touristy. But oh, the water. And seagulls. The taste of fried calamari, shrimp, fish. The sounds of barking seals at Pier 39. The Golden Gate Bridge beckoning from the horizon. Alcatraz Island looming a few miles out. And then sunset arrived on the scene, transforming the already beautiful water into a reflection of the warm and cool colors of twilight.

We headed back via cable car to Chinatown. I hanged off the side of the cable car, my feet perched on the edge, hands firmly gripping the metal bar. It was wonderfully cheesey. Chinatown was, as I had expected, disappointing. It’s dirty and crowded and if you wander into one shop, you’ve wandered into all of them.

My mom and I ventured into the largest Macy’s I have ever seen to find me a pair of boots and then got take-out from the Cheesecake Factory and picnicked in our room like queens. After only a day and a half, the hotel room had become home. It’s funny how that works.

The following day, my cousins who live in San Jose came and picked us up. We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and ate lunch in Sausolito. Then we drove around the coast, venturing over to Ocean Beach. It was sunny, sunny, sunny. So clear and crisp and beautiful. The sun reflected on the damp sand, revealing tiny jellyfish across the beach. We dipped our feet in the freezing cold water, instantly numbed. It was surreal and dazzling and made me hunger for a San Franciscan summer (even though they’re still supposed to be cold).

Next we headed to Ghiradelli Sqaure, where I had milk chocolate truffles and hot chocolate that brought me straight back to Paris (where I had the best hot chocolate of my life). We drove down Lombard Street, slowly and carefully navigating the zig zags. And then we bid farewell to our cousins and headed back to the hotel to pack for our departure the following morning.

It’s funny how as soon as you get used to a place, it feels like it is time to leave. It’s a cruel twist of life really. I still can’t picture myself there, on the West Coast, in California, in San Francisco. Maybe, though, it will become another of my homes. A place of my own. Maybe it, too, will belong to me.

I suppose I’ll just have to give it a year or so and then we’ll know.

The Beginning of the End

So here I am again. Leaving for the airport in 6.5 hours with little sleep expected. It has been a bustling day, defined—as too often I think my life is—by to-do lists. I’ve done far too good a job of ignoring those to-do lists this break, however; now is the hectic time that accounts for that leniency (aka laziness).

Today I gloried in being able to drive. Windows down in the 60 degree weather (is it really January?!?). Reading with my dog curled up next to me. Being hugged by my mom. Running errands with my little brother. Glorying in the vast land of convenient good deals that is Walmart. Looking up at a non-empty night sky for once, reacquainting myself with my beloved big dipper.

I feel sometimes that this lifestyle of commuting between states and homes requires too much stocking up, too many goodbyes, a lot of time in-between rather than in time. Looking back at my first year of college and how exciting my flights to school were, I feel so jaded and old now. Somehow I’ve changed and grown between then and now. Somehow, despite myself, I take how blessed I am for granted.

Tomorrow—er, today—I go to California, to the land that may soon be my home. I’m very stressed about the test that required this trip in the first place; I have to take teacher certification tests in California before moving there this summer.

I’m struggling to process anything and everything, probably because I am so tired. Still, I realize this is big. California. It sounds like the name of some foreign country, an exotic land, a place that wouldn’t be my home.

But in all likelihood it will be in just six months. Here I am on the verge of something big: in less than one week I will have commenced my very last semester of college. I will be “an adult” by one of its various definitions and hallmarks.

I want to go. I don’t want to leave. I want to draw a little triangle between Kansas, DC, and California and plop myself in the middle. I want everyone I know and care about to be accessible, for no home to be an ending or a final farewell.

Just help me, I pray, to appreciate this last semester for what it is. I have some stressful things ahead of me (i.e. writing and finishing my thesis), but this is it.

This is it.

It All Began with a Movie...

I went to see We Bought a Zoo tonight, which was surprisingly well-done and moving for all of its cheesiness and clichés. There was a quote that I absolutely love, made by Matt Damon’s character, Benjamin Mee:

“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.”

This philosophy helped Benjamin muster up the courage to introduce himself to his wife. I hope to live that way, to be able to get over myself and my insecurities to be bold and take action when the occasion calls for it. I also hope to find love like Benjamin did.

He mourns his wife’s death so beautifully and in such a moving manner. Sometimes I rather morbidly fantasize about how my loved ones would respond to my death. I know it sounds absurd, but imagine the opposite of Gatsby’s funeral, and it does somehow become soothing. I think of all the people who have touched my life, all the people who mean or have meant something to me, and it always serves to make me feel better. In the similar way that a teacher can almost always find at least one positive thing to say about his/her students, I think of the collisions I have had with beautiful, wonderful people: my rather romantic soul thinks that they could probably think something generous of me. That my life had purpose in that people would mourn my loss, because that would mean that I had touched them, however fleetingly.

And my romantic nature does not end there. I watched this movie, observed Benjamin’s sorrow, and thought of the ways in which his mourning proved his love. I asked myself, will I ever develop the kind of intimacy with a person, with my hypothetical husband, that it will feel as though my loss is the cutting off of an essential part of him? Will this man, somewhere out there, avoid the junk food aisle because the sea salt and vinegar potato chips will make him think of me? Will he smell his old sweatshirts that I appropriated, looking for a semblance of me? Will he regularly scroll through photos of me, of us, to bring memories of our life together back to life?

It’s silly right? and perhaps a tad too personal, to be sharing this with you. My wacky thoughts and fantasies. The ways in which I have carried a movie’s story to my life and questioned how my future husband would miss me if I died. But there was just something about this story, an embedded romantic comedy in a family-friendly-tragedy, that made the romcom-fantasy-version-of-love more believable.

Sometimes the smallest things spark our interest; sometimes a beautiful story is too beautiful to remain outside of one’s own personal experiences and dreams. So I claim that story. And fantasize about my potential marital bliss who knows how many years down the road.