Nirmala

On Columbus Avenue
North Beach
Wednesday afternoon

***

Grew up in the city of angels, or that’s what they called it, but there was nothing there that filled my senses—no, not even in Technicolor, as my expectant adolescent pen pals fantasized film backdrops and West Hollywood intrigues, while I snaked in and out of the Day of the Locusts, watched the whole world burning through my suburban window like I was seeing it on TV. Nothing other than the dull drone of Santa Monica egos and ubiquitous traffic or the smog that filled my brain at 6:30 each morning, which I learned to put up with because I didn’t know that air quality was something you could blame. No, nothing in that city that spoke to me was divine or light-filled or augured wings so featherweight they could carry me away on a dream.

City of dreams. That was San Francisco. With its ornery, wind-swept soul and narrow, sheer cliff-drop streets, and vistas of blue and skyscraper, and heavy gates of gold. This peninsula of piers and back alley tricksters, this glorious theatre of fog and magic so fleeting you barely noticed it. City of sloping hills and unexpected greenery. Picture-perfect sailboats and bathhouse ruins and dive bars where I learn the art of performance from drag queens and dime-a-dozen savants of the Beatnik variety and tragic tangueros who craft origami from Zen koans. Poetry spouted by the wisdom stewards of public transportation. The museum where I fell in love with Magritte, collegiate and callow.

Barely an adult, I could only look on in wonder and soak it in—city, majestic city, with its congestion and its carefully circumscribed neighborhoods and its indefatigable lust for newcomers. Girls like me, who longed to be seduced. When you grow up and the world is separated by arteries of highways, San Francisco (that place only peripherally spied through glass and rocks and water and a Hitchcock sunset) comes as a surprise. So that’s how I entered, twelve years ago—a sad urban drifter who’d never known the lures of the kind of place where boundaries dissolve and contradictions brush elbows from bay to ocean.

Someone once told me that a city is a lie they would always believe, but my flashes of memory are far from disingenuous. Symphony of post-adolescent chaos. Love, for the first time. Cobblestone and fountains and midnight walks along the Embarcadero. Trash blowing around in its wild, windy ballet on Fox Plaza, where a boy breaks my heart and I consign myself to corporate anonymity for three months. Sit on a park bench in Pacific Heights and cry my eyes out while moms with strollers and cell phones walk indifferently past. But even then, even then, there is romance around every corner. Dancing in South of Market nightclubs, music blaring and filling my lungs, the scent of all-night taco stands and August heat sticking to my skin like sweat. Food so delicious that I burn my tongue in my eagerness to swallow. Laughter so contagious that I have to spit my beer out in Dolores Park to catch my senses, enough to contain myself. Contain myself.

There is no containing myself here. Most of the days will be mundane, unmemorable, one cocktail bleeding into the next bike ride through Golden Gate Park, one friend replaced by another, one infinite drunken manifesto of hope negated by the negligence I know each day when homeless people try to sell me a piece of paper and I walk by without looking. Because I can’t. City of transience. New rentals every year or so, a new hotspot or place to do yoga. A new excuse to leave your job or travel the world or say that you’re sick of it all.

I only know it’s my home years after the fact, touching down on the tarmac on a rainy day in February—grateful for the familiar sobriety of winter after three months of heat and tropics and traffic and hello kisses on both cheeks. Do we choose our true home, after all?

And throughout the changes, something else takes root within me. A quietness, a slowness, a leisurely walk through my own internal landscapes, as steady as my city is capricious, as endurable as the world around me impatiently cranes its neck toward the next big thing.

Like moonlight, a city will enter your blood and stay there, for better or worse. This is how it is for me. San Francisco: the place where I grew up.

***

You can see a slideshow of Nirmala’s photo shoot here.