EMBARCADERO.

On an afternoon in late May, I left the still-cold of New York for the consistent sunny warmth of California. I met you wearing sunglasses and forgot to take them off, which proved both a lack of manners on my part as well as a subconscious need to shield myself, hide the eyes. You handed me a laminated map of San Francisco as a present for my arrival which I looked at and began immediately to make plans. We rode the Muni, lunched on sprouts and avocados, walked past fancy shop after fancy shop, climbed steep street after steep street, you adamant on showing me everything there was to show. You were showing off.

We rode out to Baker Beach where the wind grew cold and the sand blew up into our faces and the sun set oddly into the horizon like I had never seen it do before and I forgot momentarily that this was the Pacific Ocean, which I was seeing for the first time. It looked roughly the same as the Atlantic and felt just as shiveringly cold. We rode back to Haight, walked past drug offers, ate Moroccan food and smoked from hookahs. We were reliving Montreal. We were trying to recreate some past instance of pleasantness between us, when things were a little lighter, a little more breathable. But that's what the point of this trip was: you flew me out to patch things up, money became no object, time was supposed to stand still for a brief moment and we would clear the air. Breathe heavily inward. It was also some attempt to get me to admit that your lifestyle was better. Easy-going California beats Stressed-out East Coast. You'd lament on how well-designed everything was, how aesthetically pleasing, how healthy, how organic. I dutifully cringed. I put up a fight as usual.

At nine the next morning I walked the Tenderloin by myself. The only woman walking Fulton Street , I passed the strip clubs with their misspelled marquees, every man passing me offering his small solicitations. I veered back onto the safety of Market, just one block over, where the shadiness of drug deals and prostitutes ended or else just dispelled into the crowd, like a bad smell. This is the morning when I found out that you had another woman, tucked away in San Francisco, with her own apartment just blocks from yours. Very tidy of you, very efficient. And so I walked the streets of downtown aimlessly, my mind full of cotton, working itself into a frenzy because what am I supposed to do now? I just got here. My plane doesn't leave for another five days. You have no idea that I know. I left you off to work this morning pleasant as anything, and now I have nothing to do but contemplate possibly killing you, possibly killing myself, or else just disappearing unnoticed, jump on the next plane, fly back.

I walk instead. As if in a drugged haze, I walk all the way to the Embarcadero, to the piers with the tourist-trap shops and the seals sunning themselves lazily, smelling of musk. I think about my father suddenly and I don't know why. I waste time under a palm tree by the pier, with my shoes off and my jeans rolled up, looking like freedom yet feeling so hopelessly pent. I watch people pass me, whole families and older couples walking hand-in-hand and teenagers on skateboards and envying every single stranger and their perceived happiness, their liteness, as I am carrying this enormous, invisible weight. I need levity, so I go to the aquarium, the one with the tunnel of fish that you walk under, and watch sharks swim over my head and suckerfish attach themselves to the glass, staring into their circular, sieved mouths.

When the time comes to meet you, I perch myself on the wall near where the ferries leave for Alcatraz on the hour. There you come, walking with that strange jaunt you probably were never made aware that you have. I've been here exactly one day and already I fit the description of brown as a berry: a mix of tan and burn. You on the other hand glow a deeply sweaty brown and look like Summer incarnate. I hate you accordingly. Not simply because you live in a city that feels akin to paradise, not because you have Mediterranean blood coursing through you and I do not, but because you are beautiful, despite how ugly I want you to be right now to make this pain more bearable.

We walk to Telegraph Hill. I forget about you momentarily. Its lush here, the walkways wind themselves around cliffs and the gardening is dense and you can see the city stretch out beyond you like a rough, bumpy blanket. I try to find the infamous parrots but cannot. I don't remember if we spoke or not. I don't know what we'd have to talk about: Architecture? Stores I should venture to when I have the time? Small talk. Useless talk, but it keeps me away from speaking of the dangerous subjects between us. There are footnotes to our lives right now, the smallprint we may or may not bother getting to.

We course our way back to North Beach, the Italian section with its awning'ed restaurants, beatnik bookstores, and more seedy strip clubs with green and purple neon signs named things like "The Garden of Eden". The waiter who takes our order at the restaurant thinks we are a couple, and pushes the candle around the middle of the table and says, "There! Perfecto! Very romantic!" and addresses me as "Madam". All of this feels like a wall of depression suddenly being erected. We are both after all playing our parts in this facsimile of what must appear to others as Love. Neither of us wants to make a scene anymore, take our dramas to the street, and instead we simply play along with what we believe we should be.

At night I ride an actual trolley for the first time, up and down the undulating streets. I worry that it will feel like a roller coaster and am disappointed when it does not. I'm standing on the side of the car, hands firmly looped around the pole, staring down into the bay. I look back at you, you're looking off in the distance, appearing pensive which means that you are probably happy. This is your element: the trolley, the city, the wind in your face which you are probably calculating the mph factor of in your head, the lights spreading out on the skyline. I am a minor number in this equation, wholly unnecessary.

Later, in the coffee shop, I will look into your face, think about all the lies you've told me and continue to tell, I will think about your neck and what it would feel like to reach across the little cafe table and strangle it. There would be too much of a scene, it would be too messy and too involved to get out of quickly, I would look like the bad guy. I methodically tear at a napkin under the table instead. I am planning out the exact time I will tell you that I know what is going on. But there's so much to calculate before I do: I have to figure out where such a conversation should take place, somewhere that allows me to cry openly or else doesn't, how long it will take to pack up my bags again. My pragmatism surprises me.

What happens next? What happened next? This is the portion, the hours in between feigned happiness, silence, denial, that I would just as soon forget. Take it out, rip the text, skip forward or else back. Those hours that seemed endless yet held such a time constraint, as we both knew this would be it. Of course I confronted you, of course you denied it, of course it eventually could no longer be denied. Eventually it came down to nothing more than a scene like any scene: two people, man/woman, both disappointingly human.

There had been others. This I did not know until later, until the ending, like a story. A last page. The one you sit on, keep open to, reread. I reread this page sometimes, to myself, even now. For so long, you were this good book I just couldn't put down. And like any book, the ending felt like a small death. An ending, whether happy or not, is nonetheless an ending, a finite moment to be relived again and again. Or else forgotten.