While walking to the theater, I had dipped my hand into the deep pocket of my trench coat and pulled out a Budapest metro ticket, a reminder that so much had happened in between those older moments and this one. I realized that it wasn't the moments themselves I wanted; but instead, the past that I wished I could hold close if just for a moment, like an old dear friend we are forced to part from. 

It’s difficult to map the present onto this idea of the past, which is only an idea, only a memory, and isn't tangible except in the senses which come alive at its reminder. Oh, how an unexpected scent in passing can trigger what feels like falling into a black hole, proving that time travel does exist! — and it feels possible for String Theory to be true because you've accidentally fallen into an older dimension of yourself and everything was as it was, a parallel simulacrum existing quietly next to your primary reality. I have always liked to think that a version of me, the objects of my reality, exist everywhere and the conditions only need be right to be swept up in them once again.

In thinking of those simulacrum moments in San Francisco, they would be, more than any one characteristic of so many the city bears, the late-afternoon moments that edged into evening via a sleepy fog that rolled in over Twin Peaks. It was those kind of moments that taught me the internal clock that The City abided by; if its 7x7 gridded neighborhoods was its face, the fog was its ticking hands.

Before I learned to tell time in San Francisco by looking toward Sutro Tower, I thought the fog was unpredictable and at times, scary. I'll never forget when I first moved to San Francisco and lived in the Sunset district, I went out in search of lunch, and became lost; it was before I had a smartphone and was relying a feeble Mapquest printout that was dampening with the onset of an intense fog. I couldn’t see more than a hundred feet in front of me, and I couldn’t make out which direction was where, and felt swallowed whole by San Francisco. It would be moments like that, where I felt beholden to the whims of a city I didn't understand, that later turned into the moments where I found the most belonging in; the kind of belonging and love that only happens when you know something or someone through and through. 

When I had moved back to San Francisco in 2018—just two years after my unwanted departure—I thought it was serendipitous; I had materialized another chance in a city I wanted to belong to more than almost anything, as if the most defining sense of self I had was dependent on it. Being that I originally left as a consequence of circumstances outside my control, it felt almost poetic and fated that I was drawn back to The City, like my life was being course-corrected and that knowledge meant I needed to make the most of it, and take nothing for granted, this time.

I most longed for the familiarity of my old favorite haunts, jaunts, and dives - places, streets, and MUNI lines that acted like the corners of my conscious experience whose boundaries taught me just how expansive ‘I’ really was.

 I thought moving back was everything coming full circle, allowing me to bookend one of the most important and beloved chapters of my life, while starting a new one that would take me into my real adult years ahead. At once, it was closure and also a new beginning; every street corner had a memory, and every bus and train line stop was already etched into my heart, an internal map of the city that guided me on foggy nights and moments when I felt unsure, unsteady, and lost about who I was and where the hell my life was going. 

When I first moved back, I immediately did the things I had missed the most, like going to the Castro Theatre, one of the few physical places that had set the course of my life in ways I couldn’t understand when I saw my first double-feature there in 2011. I had longed to go to the Castro “just once more” so many times, to nibble on peanut M&Ms and sip tea while getting lost in the long, nostalgic notes of show-tunes being played on the organ before the showing. 

And then, I had that moment again. On a rainy weekend just shortly after moving back, I walked to the Castro Theatre and nibbled on peanut M&Ms while sipping earl grey tea, and yet there was a lingering sense of emptiness. It wasn't the same.

More than any San Francisco zip code I lived in or any MUNI line I haunted the most, it was the moments I could tell time by reading the fog as I waited for the heart of San Francisco to be washed over in a salty opacity that enveloped the hearts and eyes of everything, from the Victorians it was slowly eroding to the people who were trying so hard to call it home, that made me belong to San Francisco. 

It would be MUNI, accursed at the promise of a bus that never arrives, or the salvation found in recognizing headlights from a lightrail breaking through the fog; at last, thank god, it's here! The repose in a warm empty train on a windy, cold night; the comfort in the blur of Victorians outside those bay windows, knowing you're on your way. The otherworldliness of San Francisco's wild coastline, the beaches with signs posted cautioning of the deadly undertow; the unpredictable nature of the ocean and the sudden squalls that would batter Land's End and Ocean Beach and leave the beauty of its ruddy wildness in its wake after it passed.

There is nothing quite like ascending near-vertical hills in North Beach or Pacific Heights, the prize being a fast-beating heart that beats synchronously with the pulse of the city; and it feels like the rapid heart rates brought on by always climbing hills is what keeps the blood of San Francisco running. There is always a view to be had in San Francisco; if only you will work for it.

There is real escape a place like San Francisco, because there are always several worlds intersecting each other at once. I think of Lands End, the informal trails that lead to the cliff of the Pacific Ocean, and if you follow them you can look to your right and make out the Golden Gate Bridge blushing international orange just barely through a gown of white fog. I think of my favorite 'secret' metal bench perched on a yielding part of crumbling cliff, chained to cypress trees behind it, with a note that read the bench was for anyone who wanted to use it. I returned to that bench every week and watched its degradation in real-time, too much reminded of my own mortality as it gave way underneath the disease of salty rust, breaking apart slowly until it was only a memory of a bench with a few odd pieces of metal that sank into the cliff. To be in San Francisco was to be consumed by all of its elements; and the sense that degradation is the cost to be privy such immaculate and tempestuous beauty.