Goodbye to All That

I am not sure how to enjoy the beginnings of things without first knowing the end. I am so used to pain that I have started bracing for it, so used to disappointment that I have stopped hoping for anything. A beginning is the light at the mouth of a dark cave. An end is much harder to keep hold of, like water, it will drip through the smallest crack. The thing is, I can pinpoint the exact moment the heroine on the page became less optimistic than she was when the story began. That, too, – that loss – is a kind of beginning in its own right. The trouble is finding the place on the page when the heroine finds something new to hope for.

I am not yet sure how to find something new to hope for. When I was twenty, I moved to San Francisco. Like many heroines who find themselves in big, important cities, I came from a small town. Unlike many heroines who come from small, yet equally important towns, I did not find my new home or new life within the confines of the 49 square miles of land that make up San Francisco. The city, by all accounts, should have been easy to love. The colorful buildings, the Victorians, and the way the whole place felt like some kind of maze should have enchanted me. I wanted to love San Francisco, at least in part because it would have been a convenient beginning; the perfect place to start a new story. Perhaps I was just clinging too tightly to my last ending, to my hometown, to the forest I grew up in and the glittering water of the lake. Perhaps I was just clinging too tightly to familiarity, to knowing. I can almost see the way my story would have unfolded had I chosen to stay. I would have been consumed by the city, I would have walked the streets at night without noticing the specks of glitter in the pavement, and I would have spent my mornings in the same cafe, getting the same order.

But San Francisco never felt like a place I was supposed to stay in for long. Perhaps it’s the city’s history, but it always felt like at any moment, between one breath and the next, everything would collapse beneath my feet.

Before moving to the city, I’d been there many times. When I was sixteen, I went with the sole purpose of getting my Australian passport. The office was in a building downtown, the outside was entirely made of mirrored glass, that, remembering it now, in no way fits the image I have of San Francisco. I remember standing in that office, beside my sister, as our mother asked an Australian man in tattered clothes to be our witness. He agreed and signed the papers. We remained in the city for another day. We walked from SoMa to Haight to Golden Gate park. I remember watching as we passed through neighborhoods and watched the buildings get shorter and older as we approached the park. My sister led us into a shop that sold overpriced crystals and teas, where years later I would receive a Tarot reading in exchange for following the reader on Instagram. I don’t remember what he told me, only that he had the same deck of cards as me and the way I thought that had to be a sign of something. We ate at a taco shop that I would return to many times, once on my first weekend officially living in the city. I did not eat anything that time. I sat across from my mother, tears fogging my glasses and drying to salt on the lenses as my dad ate. The part of that trip I remember most vividly is the headache, the piercing pain that wrapped around my skull and squeezed tighter with every mile we walked, and the way it began to fade as we crossed the Bay Bridge. Perhaps that, too, should have been a sign.

When I returned, years later, now twenty. I moved into a ninth floor apartment that smelled of mildew for the first week that I lived there. My roommates and I pressed our faces against the window, looking at a tall red structure and trying to decide if it was the Golden Gate Bridge. Knowing nothing about the city, we concluded that it was and felt immensely lucky in that moment. Of course, we later discovered that the structure was, in fact, Sutro Tower.

College should have been a blur, a culmination of restless nights and experiences I would come to regret as I became older and wiser. Being young in a city like that should have been special, at least according to the rules of more interesting narratives. Perhaps it would have been special, had I not learned too early that not everything is promised and that there are some things that have the power to change you irrevocably and in ways you never wanted. I learned the fears of adulthood before I ever got the chance to be not an adult. People always called me an old soul, and thinking about it now, I can’t believe I was ever proud of being anything but young. My youth is by no means over, but I still feel like I have wasted so much of it. I am sure there are pieces of it still in San Francisco, rotting in corners of my old apartments. I like to imagine different versions of my life, all the ways things could have gone and all the stories and endings that could have been mine. My younger self sits in the farthest corner of my mind, whispering dreams to me, all the while trying to ignore the mess she became. She would be disappointed, I think, to know we did not have the life she dreamed of. But then, there are always circumstances, things outside of a person’s control. I simply wish the illusion of invincibility that comes with youth had taken a little longer to shatter.

One thing that has defined my so-called youth is standing at a crossroads, staring out into the dark in every direction, wondering what you are left with when you fear beginnings and cling far too tightly to endings.

San Francisco never felt like home, my apartments were first populated with mismatched dorm furniture, then with things I’d found for free on the side of the road, peeling posters, and yellowing white walls. If I’d stayed, how long would it have taken for the city to feel like home? Perhaps the issue is that I don’t like being unsettled, which is, of course, one of the many unfortunate inevitabilities of youth, or perhaps the issue was that I knew I would never stay long enough to buy my own furniture.

Still, I cannot help but feel the weight of all the things I was supposed to be, all the things I wanted to be. But how incredibly foolish it is of me to mourn something that never was, the almost versions of myself, the half-formed bones that never got to build anything. When I was younger, my teachers always told me I would go far, that I would become something. The problem is that I am not sure where I am supposed to go, much less what they thought I would become.

So I suppose this is goodbye. Goodbye to all that. Goodbye to the apartments with ant infested cabinets. Goodbye to the coffee shop by the beach that made me forget how suffocated I felt in the city. Goodbye to the bars where I paid far too much for drinks and stumbled my way through first dates. Goodbye to all the girls I could have loved if things had just happened a little differently. Goodbye to the almost people, the half lived dreams, and false hopes. Goodbye to San Francisco and everything it almost was.