loving and losing

I’m in love with San Francisco. It was love at first sight. I was eight when I first lay eyes on her, flying overhead, preparing to land on my family‘s move to California. We were moving south of San Jose, but the imprint of looking down on the bridges and the hills is so much stronger than any first impression of that city to the south. As I grew up, San Francisco lay north, a shining jewel I treasured visiting. Carol Doda, beat poets, Victorian houses, cable cars, and of course, the lure of the love-ins in the Haight, all seized my imagination. As a teenager, I came to the city as much as I could, and in the summer, I baked in the heat of the Santa Clara valley and longed to be enveloped in San Francisco fog. I snuck away to the Fillmore to see Janis many nights my parents thought I was spending the night with a friend. As a city, San Francisco truly has always had my heart.

I’ve lived here now well over two decades, and I’m a San Franciscan thru and thru. I’m a witch, a psychotherapist, queer, an artist, and I live in a Victorian infused with spirits. I’m an archetypal San Franciscan, merged and wedded deeply to this city of hills. I’m pretty sure my love affair will continue until I die. As committed as my love for this city is, I am not monogamous. I have loved others.

This summer, traveling to teach witch camp in England, and then on to Amsterdam, I had an affair. Not with London (much too full of pain), and not even with Glastonbury. Glastonbury is in some way family to me, I feel at home there at the holy wells and at the Tor, it’s like a coven sister I depend on now to work with me between the worlds. Traveling over the channel, I looked down from the plane and felt another great love affair begin. Amsterdam and I have chemistry. For the time I was there, I let myself love her with abandon, soaking up all she had to offer, mesmerized and enchanted as only you can be when you first fall in love. Giddy with delight, intoxicated with the pleasure of giving myself over to fully experiencing everything she had to offer, I thought a lot about my love affairs with other cities. San Francisco is not a jealous lover, a true free spirit, she has encouraged every love affair I've had, and my love of other cities had never detracted from the love I feel for her.

There are two other cities in my lifetime that I’ve fallen for, that hold a piece of my heart, that I feel blessed for every moment I spent in their embrace. Walking out of the train station in Venice, I almost swooned at her golden beauty. As I got to know her more, that beauty only intensified. The other city I’ve loved is and was New Orleans. The music that seems to permeate everything, old bars that pirates have frequented, voodoo priestesses, oysters at the Acme restaurant, decaying cemeteries, chicory coffee and beignets, the Garden District, and the languid air and spirit of the place-I loved every facet of that city. Even the frat boys puking on Bourbon Street, and how you could cross a street and feel you had literally crossed the poverty line. New Orleans was sex, death, mystery, and magic.

I am mourning her loss, grieving that she is forever changed, drowned and damaged, still soaking in a stew of poisons and misery. I am bereft beyond words. Something precious and particular is lost to this world.

My great love, San Francisco, has been an incredible comfort to me at this time. There is tenderness in this city, and a profound kinship for that city in the south that was such heady soil for all the exotic varieties not welcomed in the gardens of Walmart America. I am grieving. And as always in grief, I am amazed at the power of love. My heart hurts, and is once again, stretched.