Crumbler

Two years ago this spring, I visited San Francisco for the first time since I was in high school. I took the train in from Oakland, and when I emerged from the underground onto Embarcadero I felt a peculiar flash of inspiration. I’m going to move here, I thought. It was a strange feeling, one I’d never experienced while visiting New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. With my suitcase in one hand and a coat in the other, I watched throngs of people making their way toward the Ferry Building and felt certain I would someday join them permanently. 

I’ve visited several times since then, and every trip only bolstered that first premonition. I felt it when I rode a bike one sun-kissed day across the Golden Gate Bridge, and again when I visited the pirate-supply store at 826 Valencia. I felt it when I dined at the Google cafeteria as the guest of a friend, piling my plate high with lobster and Kobe prime rib, and later when I drank the best rum of my life at the Hangar One distillery. (The owner told me that he hated rum, and wanted to try his hand at making some he would actually enjoy. The taste was indescribable, and the rum still isn’t available for purchase.)

Later in that year, 2008, Milk came out, and I felt that yearning once again: Old Harvey had taken the intoxicating sense of possibility he felt in the Castro, and turned it into something real and forever.

I began to look for a job that would take me to a place that, as foreign as it remains, felt oddly like home — and now I’ve found one. Next month I will pack up and move to the city, where I will crash in the guest room of a kind friend until I find a place of my own. The picture above, which has for some time served as the wallpaper on my computer, will now become a thing I see every day as I make my way around town. That feels good.

Life can be hell on your dreams. The sense of limitless possibility that propels you through adolescence dissipates over time. Maybe you fail; more likely, you compromise. It can take a change of scenery to snap you out of it — to put you back in touch with that younger, world-beating self. You step out from a strange subway and catch a view of yourself from a different, more flattering angle. The city looks good on you. And so you take a deep breath, and cross the bridge.