i left my heart...

I miss San Francisco. There's no doubt about it. Mostly, I don't think about it, but sometimes it's so acute I wonder if I should've left. I feel out of place in the Midwest, similar to when I moved to California as a kid–I just looked odd. As an adult you're not supposed to feel like you don't fit in, but it happens anyways.

I was eager to leave the bay, and I'm happy that I did. But still, sometimes, I remember how great it could be. This metropolis just doesn't seem filled with the same kind of crazy, dream-filled folks that SF attracts. Everyone has some fantastic idea that draws them to the bay, looking to create a life, cook up a plan, invent themselves, and most importantly, to make things right.

Some come to join a circus, lead a band, become a teacher, a journalist, a housing organizer, a puppet maker, a painter, an herbalist, a social worker, a pastry chef, an anarchist soccer player, an activist, a filmmaker, a poet, a gallery owner, a belly dancer, a bike mechanic, a hacker, a politician, a restaurant owner, a collective member, or all these things, but always something more than what they were.

I know the bay can be annoying, and overpriced, and cloistered, it's just that I'm sentimental about things that are gone. After all these years denying it, I can't escape that I'm truly a Californian now. Rather than returning to the West coast, Chicago is pushing me further east. But even on the East coast I feel more aligned. I miss the salt air like crazy, I'm a coastal kid at heart, that doesn't seem to change.