8.29.20 // love/hate relationship

San Francisco.
.
I've never understood a "love/hate relationship" until I met you.
.
You made me feel the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
.
Before I moved here and in the first year I called you home, you made me feel unstoppable, I was larger than life. I was more alive than I had known possible. I was moving at a million miles an hour. Life was mine for the taking, as I dove into the world of technology and handcuffs of gold.
.
I thought I had found myself, had grown into someone I was truly proud of. But was it someone I was proud of or someone I thought others could be proud of?
.
I did change.
.
I did become someone else, and as the shiny facade of the city faded so did that brilliance in my heart, wearing as the time ticked by after that first year.
.
Finding myself spending every weekend out of the city, I realized I had become angrier, desperate for a community to be my unrestricted weird self in, and yearning to be in a place where nature is the law, not the exception.
.
I yearned.
.
So I left. And with me left my identity. My ability to easily pinpoint who I was by where I was, the ability to recommend the best places to eat in a world-renowned city, and describe people judgmentally by the neighborhood they chose to reside in.
.
But there were people, beautiful souls here that I loved and still love, there are restaurants that I crave and salivate merely thinking of, there are still parks and places and companies who keep the city beautiful and exciting.
.
That's why for me, San Francisco is my vortex.
.
It's beautiful, secretly draining, and inviting. Qualities that pull me in if I'm not careful...