Struggling to Update

A few days from now it will have been one year since the apartment I'm writing in right now looked like this. And now, as in right now, this very moment, it's starting to look like this again. Piece by piece, bleach-scrub by bleach-scrub, and drop of sweat by drop of sweat, I'm dismantling what I've spent a year putting together; haphazardly carting it into the appropriate boxes and preparing to move once again. A move north to San Francisco where, once again, I will be faced with another empty, small cavern of an apartment in need of being put together and larger project or a city and another life that needs to be reinstated and rebuilt. I don't often quoth hip hop, but in the words of Nas, "destroy and rebuilt it."

What I expected these last few days, I'm not quite sure. But I don't think I expected to feel as bittersweet as I have, nor nearly as longing. Certainly I didn't expect any of that. What I overlooked was just how tightly-woven I had become in these here Southern Californian filaments, how familiar San Diego, and even on a deeper level its neighborhoods, Golden Hill, Hillcrest, East Village, Little Italy, the places I walked and biked and frequented on daily bases, the clear cut portal towards the bay and the Carnival cruise ships moored there, those same cruise ships bellowing at night or in the morning as they arrive or leave, or the sound of air being pulled back as planes tore past my window. Even the smell of my building's vestibule, if you can even call it that, and the creepy-beyond-belief, malapropos portrait of Jesus so old it's turned him into the color of an avocado, which by the way is much more appealing and useful than Jesus. I'm sensing a pattern and that pattern is I could go on and on. The Mexican bakery up the street with jalapeño sourdough flutes. The taco cart open until 4 a.m. on the weekends a block away. And I don't even eat tacos, but biking home from somewhere late and catching the tortilla aromatics or just seeing the two or three people working there grinning ear to ear in fits of laughter was wonderful. And the flower peddler, every night there, aluminum buckets overflowing with bright, colorful blossoms, roses, daffodils, whatever he had at the moment, stationed in front of a liquor store of all places. 

So what does all of this amount to? A lesson in taking things for granted, I'd say. A lesson in all the ways I'm impacted in so many ways by so many things and so many people I may not even be aware of, and how in future reference it is so direly imperative to be aware of these things because they flare and fade quickly, like all good tragedies. In so many ways this has been a year of loss, so many, too many things having gone out of my life, some for good, others I hope not. But in so many other ways it's been a year of gain, of mercurial moments and gorgeous, memorable experiences. Which is to say that it was probably a completely natural and average year. One hopes, at the end of a 365 day affair, if they are lucky to survive all of those days and emerge in one healthy piece, that the mathematics work in their favor. One hopes the gain topples the loss, if not in quantity than at the very least in quality. One hopes the scale tips in their favor.

None of this is to say that the same won't happen in San Francisco. In all likelihood, the thrust of feeling there will be even greater, if the times I've visited and spent there are any indication. But having spent so many years unbelievably numbed and bored by the places I've lived, it was a critical feeling to be somewhere like this, a place that for all but one crucial aspect was flawless. A place where I could at last refer to somewhere as home and not taste something putrid in my mouth or resent that fact that home was a place, of all things, to go home to. But nobody likes leaving, nobody likes goodbyes, and nobody likes giving up something that was at its deepest core worthwhile. 

It's interesting the, for me at least, as someone who tends to find immeasurable interest in the weirdest and/or uninteresting things, to examine two photographs I've taken. One is from, as I stated earlier, about a year ago. The other is from a few days ago. They photographs are within a week and a few days from being taken on the first one's inaugural anniversary. Both are for the most part awful, as they were taken at similarly awful times and in terrible lighting. But the pictures are as close to carbon copies as you can get. 

 

The first one is from a year ago and the second one is from recently, and any changes are merely due to banal chance, nothing more nothing less. The picture is so very much the same picture, the city so very much the same city. What's changed is what always changes. The person behind the camera, behind the book, behind whatever it is, seeing the subject which he or she is seeing in, and I hesitate to call it a new light, but from a different angle, the perch shifted slightly so that they can absorb it in a way they may not have before. In one picture it's an outsider looking in, peering down into something foreign and explored. In the other it's a local's last frame, one more shot before he goes, an insider's world taken from the outsider's perspective.

I will indeed miss San Diego. But I don't leave here with any sadness, only excitement with a bit of melancholy dripping slowly and solemnly from it, that's all. Most of all I'll miss the comfort I'd, perhaps too late, found in San Diego's little-known pockets here or there away from the hubbub and in  the people I came to know. The important thing to be able to say is that I sincerely loved the time I spent here, and I'll remember these times with fondness.