Mon Oct 31
Sleepy sunrise
Yesterday JR got me on those electric scooters for the first time. We zoomed around Lake Merritt into downtown to catch the subway into the city to meet up with our Swiss friends on their last night here. The plan was to meet up at the Wave Organ and then go check out Dolores Park before getting dinner somewhere vegan in the Mission (our friends being vegan-preferring, when they can help it).
I was feeling unusually bouncy and happy yesterday morning, and wrote, and constructed an outfit around a new sweater, and put on makeup for the first time since probably before the pandemic. The sun had come out in Oakland and the weather was bright and warm. I tend to resist trying new things, but I wanted to go into the city without the car, and after a block on the e-scooter I felt like a natural and a pro (and beautiful—cf. the proliferative phase of the menstrual cycle). I took a selfie and sent it to NB, who didn’t reply; as it was a Sunday morning, I did not worry. After all, they had planned to go into the hospital the next day for a sweep, and so I felt confident booking plans across the bay.
We were four or five stops down the subway line when I saw the text. The train reached the last east bay stop and we got off and stood on the platform, dumbfounded in blinding sunlight. I cried. We turned around, went home, and sat there waiting for a text or call. JR made food which I ate: dumplings and barley. I meditated and grounded and held my friend’s hand from a few miles away, closing my eyes to my apartment and entering her heart, which was racing like a bunny’s. After two hours, her partner sent the photo of her holding her baby to her breast and smiling up at us, and all the tears came. I had not realized how worried I had been about it going okay. Nine months of repressed anxiety dissolved like salt granules back into the ocean from an unpopulated shore. I did not have to be there for her to be safe and well.
In order not to miss our Swiss friends’ last night, we turned around and went back to the city. I could not be bothered to reapply eyeliner or mascara. As we rose up from the escalator onto the Embarcadero, we felt the chill. JR rented us e-bikes and we flew along the water, past the throngs of tourists and the piers. I had never seen a cruise ship up close, and as we passed a behemoth of a ‘Princess’ waiting in the bay, I wondered how many graduate students it could house. I imagined Santa Cruz providing offshore housing to its grad workers, and a little ferry (I was being cheesy and imagining a tugboat) that ran batches of students to and from the boardwalk.
We biked north out of the cool sunshine and into a dark chill that was more familiar to my childhood memories as San Francisco. We found our friends, bundled and windswept, near the marina, and together made our way to Dolores Park. The park was overrun with people, many partying, many in costumes for Halloween. I spotted a tight bouquet of red spray roses that had been left on the sidewalk. I monitored them for a few minutes, and when none of the surrounding crowds produced a person to claim them, asked JR to do so. Stephan had part of a joint that he said was quite strong, and we passed it around.
It felt good to smoke for pleasure; I had gotten used to resorting to weed only in moments of extreme flareups of pain. It was like we were back in Europe, at a large park full of people, overlooking a dense city, idly smoking before dinner, the season deepening. I took the hits to the head and fell silent, observing certain facets of the scene with sharper focus. A guy with bells sewn into leather straps fastened around his ankles was serenading a group of people in an exaggerated Dylanesque drawl. A collection of cyclists with tricked-out bikes gathered and loosed its members one at a time down and up the steep hill in the center of the park. Women called out the names of their unleashed dogs warningly. I found this all unspeakably funny. The sun set behind the hill which was itself buried in a frozen avalanche of fog. The city’s silver buildings took on a cotton-candy sheen that faded quickly.