To A, on a summer Monday
I spent some time looking at aerial photograph maps of your shop today, and your apartment. I could see the paths we walked at the park, Effie’s and the gas station on your corner, and your apartment building where I’d walk up the stairs ahead of you and wiggle my tush for your always-appreciative benefit. I could see your parking spot, and the pool I swam in and your willow tree.
It’s all still there. Every bit of it. And I really don’t know how that can be. How can it still be there if you’re not? It’s nonsensical of me to ask, I know, but that’s what went through my mind. That world existed for me only because of you. Therefore, shouldn’t it have disappeared with you? Shouldn’t the entire state of California have just sunk into the ocean the day you died?
I was looking at pictures from the LGBT Pride Parade in The Fucking City today, too, seeing landscapes that were not necessarily ones I’d been through before, but familiar because it’s San Francisco, and it looks the part. And I felt a twinge, and some nostalgia. I love that city. But I learned to love it at your side, so forever after it will be a wistful love. We’ll never walk the Golden Gate. We’ll never take the Barbary Coast walking tour like we planned. And yet I will never see a photo, or read a story, or hear a reference to TFC without thinking of you, and all you showed me there. I will always hear James Taylor and Billie Myers as the soundtrack to my memories. I left my heart in, and a little south of, San Francisco. And it stays there, lost and lonesome for you.