Dear San Francisco,


I've lived in you for almost ten years and I hardly know you.

I'm deciding how to leave you. It's surprisingly difficult.

For all of our differences you've become my home, memories locked within a scattering of blocks,
but thrill is absent. Instead, there's a fog rolling in.

Your winds come again as the sun slips away.


I know your four-way stops – cars whose drivers throw right-of-way out the window. Pedestrians on the brink of death at every crossing.

Your dogs and street trash. Your brunches and cocktails. Steep inclines and their knee-breaking descents.

A sweet smell of jasmine clings to rotting fences; those pristine and decrepit Victorians slammed side by side in neighborhoods atop subterranean rivers. The ever-present seismic uncertainty of impending retrofits.

Your wealth, your bitcoin, your Eucalyptus and coffee.


I walk the streets, stare through windows whose lights flicker beyond drawn broken blinds, Ikean gauze. Spend days watching the sun shift through Folsom street elms.

I choose blocks based on moods. I pick faces to toss grins towards in hopes of a return.

I've run through your shadows with glee and fear. I've clutched my keys between each finger and passed a thousand eyes.

You are not a kind city. But you aren't cruel, either.

You're simply a mishmash of stucco and lath upon sand dunes and granite, ghost ships and burial grounds.

Your bars close early and trap us here in that blanket of mist. It whispers, go home.
So we do. Over and over again – another Campari please – melting away in the red light.


You are as impermanent as your weather and as fickle as your shade.

You are not my city, but you'll belong to whoever claims you.

Ownership brings a strange fight; most fervent are those born and raised.

Equity is a word that rings through. It seems a climb up Jones forever to get there.