This article is part of I Love San Francisco, a feature series of essays that highlight what makes San Francisco iconic and irreplaceable.
SF I love you. Unrequitedly. You’ve been my home for 11 years. I’ve had to leave three times now, extendedly, in a state of complete destitution and mental exhaustion.
As a fourth such quickly approaches, I guess I’m forced to accept that I’ve failed to learn a lesson. But as soon as I leave, all I can do is think about you fondly, and plot a return. This cycle has seriously messed me up, and I appear to spiral downward quicker each time.
Human life seems to be seriously undervalued here… or at the very least my own life does. What exactly is it that you see as my destiny? Homelessness? Suicide? Is there something on the other side of losing absolutely everything that I’ve kept at bay by mistakenly resisting? I doubt it.
Your beauty, perhaps, is paralleled by Mendocino and Santa Barbara, eclipsed by most European cities. Your politics are wonderful in theory, but not unique to you, or even practiced as well as smaller cities. Your gingerbread Victorians are lovely, but also proto-tract-homes, and you haven’t had an architectural gem unveiled in decades. In terms of High Culture, you can never hold a candle to New York, which is impossibly bleak, or even Los Angeles, which you regard as shallow and polluted. But you would be equally sprawling if you had the land mass, and you’re blessed with windswept coast on three sides that make you appear more clean than you are.
Your subterranean nightlife is beautiful, as any road to ruin can be. You seem to function well as a decadent playground of trust fund kids, many of whom are brilliant, and even go on to greatness, but most often elsewhere.
Your luminaries have mostly been transients. Why is that? Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg, Mark Twain, even Armistead Maupin left indelible marks on your culture, and moved along. I guess I can’t fault you for that, as James Joyce did the same for Ireland. But it makes you appear to be a place of awakening, not a permanent home.
I just want you to be a home.
You have opened my eyes and mind, and completely drained my soul, much like an early-20s relationship.
And still I love you. You’re an affliction.
Written anonymously on Craigslist in 2002. Read an essay on this post in The Bold Italic.
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