Boots and Iced Coffee Days
I moved to San Francisco, California one
month ago, during the high pitch of what I will probably think of as my boots
and iced coffee days.
I will call them that because in my memory –
which will be dulled by the quiet flow of Jameson – my life during this time
will be remembered as one long afternoon spent lounging on a stoop, clad in big
lascivious boots regardless of the weather or hills.
That, and drinking iced coffee on humid
streets discussing the characteristics or contradictions of any number of things
that were important and convoluted and therefore entirely up for grabs:
Sexuality. Money. Drugs. Men.
The meaning of life itself – not just any
life but our own lives, each of our conversations underlain with the same
pleading question about what the fuck we were doing with them. What are we even doing with our lives? we’ll
remember shouting, incredulous, around a smoky bonfire or the peaky light of a
cell phone singing dreamy music in a local park.
We are in our early twenties, we are aspiring
writers or photographers or artists, going from job to job, house to house.
Semi-nomadic, lazy perfectionists.
We’ll recall lamenting in the fact, detailing
with precision, that we don’t have time. We don’t have money to have time. And
with that, our lives are not our own. Rather, they belong to restaurants and
cafes and bars and bookshops. The restaurants and cafes and bars and bookshops
that we need in order to keep wearing boots and sitting on stoops and drinking
iced coffee.
After trying on various identities already, we
will remember ourselves as bawdy and audacious, tired and free.
Last week I sat in an array of new parks in
new neighbourhoods with a new clutch of soon-to-be soul mates. Three of them. Passing whiskey
and joints, I learned about them, and them me. Conversation genuine and
unadulterated, time and place our only immediate similarities, I dismounted a
life long piggyback.
No longer reliant on other’s ideas of myself.
I realize I had, for years, been echoing what was expected. Like a soulless
poem written by a computer. Though still
muddled with a hangover of angry teen bullshit, I no longer feel condemned to
be me.
No. I feel hallowed, blessed. I am here. I’m
glad I did this, which ever way it goes, and I won’t forget this.
What I am likely to forget are the feelings
of displacement, loneliness, sickness and trepidation. I’m likely to forget the
seemingly intercontinental immaturity of men and the cost of living and the "paradise in Netflix lights," as quoted from a zine given to me by my subletter.
But this?
This freedom?
This fear, these people?
My boots and iced coffee days? I could never forget.
Daniel and his hangover coffee, Noe Valley
Rooftop scowls, SoMa
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