here

This isn't about dreaming, it's about waking.

In the morning, or sometimes in the middle of the night, when I'm lying in bed half-awake, I hear the sounds swirling below the window, like a car treading on wet pavement, I sense my husband sleeping beside me, my eyes still closed… it is at this point in waking that I forget where I am. I think I am still in San Francisco, in our small bedroom overlooking the bay, that it’s a rainy winter day and I still have a bit more time to sleep before my alarm goes off. Or maybe it’s a Saturday and I can sleep as late as I want. In the haze of waking I feel as if I am in a familiar bed. Not the one I come to realize I am in, on a much busier street in a different city halfway across the earth. The awareness that I'm not where I think I am develops slowly, and no matter how many times I have awoken in this same bed I forget almost every morning. For just a few moments everyday I awake to a San Francisco morning. Its not that I'm necessarily disappointed when I come to realize where I am, its more like waking from a pleasant dream. I know that SF is in the past and I don’t want to go back. At least not for a long while.

This happens to me every time I move, my mind waking in an old bedroom while my body wakes in the new one, yet this feeling has hung on longer here. In my mind I am still in San Francisco, it still feels like home to me, even though I have left it. I keep running across ghosts of my old city. I go have coffee in the café of a dept store downtown that a guidebook recommends, for the view. And up on the 6th floor it is a pretty nice view; you can see all the rooftops of Amsterdam, the spires of the churches in three directions. But while I'm looking out the window I start to feel like I'm in the rooftop café of another dept store. I used to have lunch at the café on the top floor of Nordstrom's in the SF Center when I worked across the street. The view from up there was of my office building across the street, (quite and ornate number 12 stories high) up the cable car tracks of Powell Street, past Harry Denton's Starlight Room with its tacky neon sign, all the way to the top of the hill at California Street. Sitting in the café I couldn’t help but compare the two, and how similar they felt. Maybe because there aren’t many views in a city with no hills, and just having one reminded me of home. But even the mediocre food and coffee were eerily similar, as was the shape of the windows that held the lofty views.

San Francisco felt like my home not only because I lived there for a long time (long by my standards - 5 years or so) but because I choose to live there. So many other places that I have lived in my life I just sort of ended up in. I wanted to live there, and I grew to like it more every year. But in the end I also grew very weary of it. Maybe that means that I loved it all the more that I started to become so critical of its many flaws. Maybe I just can't stay in once place for very long.

My last home in San Francisco was a tall, creaking house in Bernal Heights. I lived there for 2 years, which is the longest I have lived in the same building (apart from my childhood home). It was also the first house I ever owned (well, sort of owned). But I didn't even like the house that much; I liked the location much more. (It was close to both downtown and the funkier parts of town, it was a quick freeway hop to the beach. Plus the neighborhood had a good mix of people, was relatively safe and quiet, and had an independent health-food supermarket a block away.) So here I am now, in another place where location is more important that anything else. If I had my way, I would live by the sea. Any sea really, that is the only location that really matters to me. Everyplace else is just the same.