When I moved to San Francisco in March 2002, it felt like 2,000 miles away from San Jose where I moved from and still went to work every day. My only friend was my roommate, a former classmate from photography class at the
Academy of Art. And, my goal was to disappear and live my life as invisibly as possible. It was easy to succeed in the beginning.
After four years of living in the Upper Haight, just two blocks from Haight and Ashbury, I had finally gotten a job in San Francisco and was starting to make friends and getting to know neighborhoods other than my own. By befriending some colleagues who lived nearby and putting my past hermit behaviors aside, I soon became entrenched in the Upper Haight life. I spent evenings at a
local watering hole and quickly got to know some of the Upper Haight characters, running into many of them even when I was trying to be inconspicuous. By this point, I had a desire for "community" but, also really enjoyed being able to fade out, holing up in my apartment and turning off my phone at regular intervals.
When I moved to the Sunset almost two years ago, it was not a coincidence that I picked a street-facing apartment with great big windows pulling in the sunlight and views of people outside. I had spent the previous year and a half in a tiny studio below Twin Peaks, where I left my friends at the door or the curb and sunk into solitude by simply closing my door to the world, which I couldn't see from my windows that faced a walkway between apartment buildings. Moving into a bustling neighborhood again excited me and moving into my fabulous one-bedroom made me eager to invite friends in and share my space more.
I tell this story because, one of the reasons I love San Francisco is for the communities that exist when one opens themselves up to them. My desire to build a community of diverse friends and chosen family has been strong for years, and after eleven years of building just such a community, I worry about leaving it behind. My most profound example of the community I'm a part of and truly love is the one that got together yesterday on a hill in
Cesar Chavez Park, at the Berkeley Marina.
Almost a month ago, one of our colleagues and friends passed away from ovarian cancer. In the days that followed, I cried and mourned the loss of someone I wanted to know better than I did. She reached out to me before her diagnosis via a group email and I gasped and sobbed alone in my room. A group of us sent her a care package thinking she would be around for decades longer than her 34 years. It was a shock when I saw the Facebook post that she had passed two weeks after a mutual friend and I talked about the lesion they found in her liver. "Don't worry" our friend urged in a Facebook response to her partner's plea for prayers. "We're going after it more aggressively."
She was someone who lit up a room and made me want to be a better person. That afternoon on the hill, friends who hadn't seen one another in up to four years told stories of her. We held hands and hugged and were grateful that we were together even though the reason for it was unwanted and the loss of one of us was devastating. After a few hours of tears and laughter and a moving story of her last days told by her partner, we shared "epic food" in a bungalow in North Berkeley. I felt surrounded by giants.
That community makes it very hard to leave. But, I know that there will be visits and emails and phone calls. Because community is something that can be carried along, no matter where one goes.
