December 5, 2012: My 25th birthday. A and I spread an old comforter on the grass in Alamo Square park and stretch our bodies into the waning sunlight. We feel the gentle crunch of fallen leaves underneath us as we lay down, padded by the layer of polyester fill and our winter coats. It’s not quite winter in San Francisco. Or rather, we already had something akin to winter, when the ocean and the bay exhaled their cold, gray mist over the city from June through September. The consequence of a summer that feels like winter is that a fall day like today, when the sunlight offers its life-giving tonic, feels like real summer, like relief.
I know people that left the city because of all this seasonal chaos, citing depression via lack of sunlight or wanting beach days without a puffer jacket and cold, salty wind in their face. But A and I are young and unsentimental. We are not looking for indicators that anchor us to a time and place, like the way snow sparkles during the holidays or the relief of a rogue sprinkler on a languid July afternoon. We don’t know what we’re looking for. But we long for it. Maybe I do more so than A.
I want it all to be for love… but what do I love that much?
He found a place he wants to be for a while. Or at least, Silicon Valley wants him, his fresh talent, his moldable intellect, his untethered-ness that lets him use all his hours and reserves for The Job. Maybe he doesn’t love The Job. But he loves The Work, what he can express, the problems he can solve through code. In the hours between the end of my workday and the much-later end of his, I feel a pang of jealousy. I also want to work that long and hard, too. And I want to do it for love. Not just my work, but everything I do in my life: how I show up for friends, how I pour a drink, what I wear to bed even. I want it all to be for love. But, aside from A, what do I love that much?
I spend hours dwelling on the question, searching. I throw myself into anything that might offer an answer, like cooking. Sometimes I spend hours on just one meal. On weekends, I walk a mile and a half downhill to the Embarcadero farmer’s market from my neighborhood in Lower Nob Hill. I pass the dragon gates of Chinatown and the opaque towers of the Financial District. The tops of my thighs burn by the time I reach the produce stalls. I spend all the cash I have on beautiful things: lace-edged green lettuce, watermelon radishes with hot pink swirls, apples that look like glass candies. I stop at the seafood market on Stockton with its brine-scented bins of scallops and clams and tiny brown shrimp on my way back up the hill.
I get home red-faced and sweaty, arms about to give out. I pick something out of the grocery bags, usually an apple or a peach depending on the season, and eat it over the sink. Juices run down my chin. I take greedy bites, putting my hunger on display like no one’s watching.
Then I turn on music that matches my heart beat, still pounding from the walk, and get to work. In those moments, hot-headed and endorphin-high, I feel close to finding an answer. Commitment to something feels good: the sweat, the muscles trembling from hard work, from creating something that wasn’t there before. Commitment to what, though? Is it cooking? What do I love that much?
December 5, 2022: My 35th birthday. I grip the corners of our beach blanket, letting it catch in the cool wind before spreading it over the patch of sand we claimed as ours for the afternoon. I sit down and take out a book. A and our daughter, O, huddle next to me. Jacket-clad and sunscreen-ed up, we create our own warmth. O asks if she can go to the playground. Yes, this beach has a playground. And bathrooms, a restaurant, and a pool in case you’d like to entirely forget you’re at the beach but still access a body of water. I used to turn up my nose at the people who utilized these offerings, who didn’t come to the beach for the beach. Now I’m one of them. Having a three-year-old constantly humbles me like that.
A takes O to the playground while I read my book. This is part of my birthday gift. Not just the foggy beach day (possibly I’m the only one who likes them?). But A looking after O while I sit here. Alone time. Or as alone as I can be when my family is within shouting distance. But I try to relax and settle in. I know the time will quickly give way to the urgency of lunch and naptime. I know what it’s taken just to get here: the chaos of getting all the Stuff we now require into the car, the negotiations over sunscreen and jackets and sand toys.
I let the mist rolling off the ocean settle on the bridge of my nose, the tops of my bare feet. I love the beach on a foggy afternoon like this one. I love the low-grade roar of a choppy ocean and the monotone horizon, slate-gray water indistinguishable from slate-gray sky except for its movement, bursts of silver and white foam in the distance. It reminds me of San Francisco, the beaches there, my old life there.
Back then, I would’ve given anything for what I have today: an answer to the longing, to the question. What do I love that much?
Sometimes I miss that time, my early-to-mid-twenties when my life had none of the shape it does today, all of the squishiness of potential, the freedom of being responsible to no one for long stretches of time when I could wake up to the sound of my own heart beat and follow it aimlessly through the city, up and down those steep hills, discovering neighborhoods, meeting friends for drinks I couldn’t afford, alternating between the elation and despair that often accompany an open-ended day, an open-ended life.
Back then, I would’ve given anything for what I have today: an answer to the longing, to the question. What do I love that much? I’ve answered it a hundred times over by now. I bound my life to A’s. I dedicated my love to books and cooking and all the places I’ve called home in the past ten years. And because that wasn’t enough, I wrote to find more answers. Then I wrote just to write. Then I realized it, my answer: writing. It fulfilled something none of the office jobs I held or other hobbies I pursued ever did. Then I surprised myself by finding an even greater love in my daughter, an endless love that never bottoms out.
Now my life has more shape to it than I ever imagined it could. Each time I find a new answer, a new love, the edges gel a bit more. Will they ever solidify, become unchangeable? I think about this with every passing year, about the warning of middle-aged restlessness and regret, the stagnance of having everything in place. But I keep finding new things to love, new ways to love, new depths to the love I already have. The edges fray and reshape themselves.
I still see a hundred pathways. I guess the difference between my twenties and now is that I no longer live in those pathways, in some future, theoretical version of myself. I live here: watching my daughter and husband play together, hearing the ocean roar, rereading my favorite Joan Didion. Present in the love I have right now. Though I still long for more. Maybe I always will.
