City Love

Have you been writing? No. Why not? I don't know. I guess nothing has felt important enough to write about... (Reader peruses previous posts. Essays? Monster bathrooms? Really??)

So, yeah. Seems silly. I suppose my life has been as full of essays and monster bathrooms (or the post-collegiate equivalents) as it was. So what's the difference? Sharing my thoughts suddenly feels so self-indulgent. I wonder why. How would I know though, really?

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This has been a summer full of new things: new friends, living in tipis, living with 14-year-old girls, living without internet, singing and playing, square-dancing, peanut butter eating, double-layering of long-underwear (well, to be honest, that one's not new), paddling, planning on moving north.

So now I'm home, drinking coffee, going through cigar boxes full of detritus my once-younger self determined to be worthy of saving; a letter "From the desk of Sir Chloe and Sir Alex" which we must've written when we were about 8 years old, among other things. I saved that one, but a lot of things got the boot. Not unlovingly, thoughtfully certainly, but they were booted all the same. Movie stubs and photos- most of them didn't make the cut. As I've been pal-ing around, living a life appropriate to my newly adopted title, "Lady of Leisure", I've been looking around Oakland, loving it.

There's something about this city that makes me feel like I'm standing smack in the middle of a torrential downpour of rain. Stuck without a raincoat, I'm soaked to the bone in seconds. What can you do but embrace the flood and remember when you were younger how you used to take the long way back from the bathroom it was raining so that you could be in the rain for as long as possible? In a way, I am hesitant to call it mine because I feel like there's so much of it that I don't know. But then again, I've lived here my entire life, and what more license I possibly need? Except, maybe, owning the Oakland Raiders.

There's this thing about Oakland- it gets a bad rap. This summer, a new acquaintance of mine asked me if Oakland is totally "ghetto". I kicked him in the shins and asked if he always gets kicked in the shins. A city is so much more than we give it credit for, has so much more life to it than of often consider. It lives through us, and we live through it, so how could we think for one second that where we live doesn't matter? Or that our lives and our selves are separate from the cities where we live and make ourselves? What arrogance.

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Last night I found myself on the streets of San Francisco for the first time since I became this version of myself, after spending the summer outdoors under sun and stars, spending really good time with my best friend from high school, playing music, regrouping and reorienting and redirecting. I was there to hear the author Jonathan Safran Foer, speak. Genius.

Afterward, I stepped into the nighttime and was enveloped in cool, living, air. I was struck with a sense of freshness and electricity, and it occurred to me that I will miss this air, and this city. I wonder if I will find this elsewhere, this air and feeling and home.