Jaredbiz.Blog

San Francisco, I didn’t come to you to be saved. I came to pay attention.

You taught me how. In the mornings, the light dilates slowly, and Karl drifts down the avenues like a long breath no one is finished taking. The coffee shop doorbells stumble over themselves to greet whoever made it through the wind. A Muni bus leans into the curb and lowers its knee like an old dancer; the doors exhale, and the day pours in—nurses with night-shift eyes, kids in oversized hoodies, a man balancing a bundle of flowers he clearly cannot afford but bought anyway.

I learned your grammar one stop at a time. Press the yellow strip. Step back. Hold on. Thank the driver. I learned that everything is a landscape here: fire escapes blooming with tomato plants, ocean fog snagged on Sutro’s shoulder, the sudden hush of eucalyptus when Golden Gate Park remembers what it was before we asked it to be park-shaped. I learned that you keep your secrets in dim stairwells and tiled vestibules, but you never hide your heart—only veil it, like the bridge at dusk, turning its own pulse into gold.

Some places are a career move. You are a classroom. You remind me that the work of a life is the work of a day, repeated with a little more care, a little more courage. I plan lessons with the window cracked, your fog creeping in to underline my margins. I grade papers to the percussion of crosswalks and the hymn of gulls. When my students ask me what the point of history is, I think of your murals in the Mission—paint that refuses to forget—and I tell them: memory isn’t a weight; it’s a lantern.

It’s easy to make postcards of you. I could list the reliables: iridescent sunset on Ocean Beach, a fortune cookie still warm in Chinatown, a saxophone solo tunneling through the Powell Street station, the Ferry Building rivering the smell of peaches down the hall. I could show the lens flare on a late bus and call it holiness, and some days that would be true.

But love, if it is honest, is not only a highlight reel. So here’s the whole frame: sirens stitching up the night; wind that makes a meal of umbrellas; rent that performs trapeze acts over the safety net; the irreducible fact that some people sleep in doorways while luxury flickers in penthouse windows. I walk by and I am a citizen of both grief and gratitude, practicing the small civic rituals available to me—eye contact, a name learned, a coffee shared, a vote cast, a call made, a hand up. I do these not because they solve you, but because they keep me human inside you.

You taught me the mathematics of tenderness. Two people in a studio can be a cathedral if the light is right and the dishes are done. A Sunday pot of sauce can double as a love letter if you let it simmer long enough. A run along the Embarcadero counts as therapy when the ferry horn agrees to keep your secrets. The market on a Saturday morning is a choir of stone fruit and small talk. The Golden Gate, in its benevolent arrogance, makes a vow each sunset it has every intention of keeping.

I love your crooked logic: hills that insist on calves, streets that refuse straight lines, neighbors who swap basil for drill bits, the way fog makes everything new and forgiven. I love that you can be five neighborhoods in a twenty-minute walk and a lifetime in a single block. I love that a conversation about weather can end in a conversation about home.

Home. That’s the word I kept away from you at first, as if naming it would spook it. But the truth is, I knew the second time the bus driver waited for me—hand extended, smile like we were old friends—that I was already building something here. Not a masterpiece. Not a plan that would look good on a slide. Just a daily practice: keeping the kettle on, answering the city when it calls me down the stairs, choosing to count my days in stairs and fog and the eloquence of small kindnesses.

There are cities that invite you to perform yourself. You let me become myself. Under your thrifted jackets and your street fairs, beneath the techno heartbeat and the incense of old churches, you’re a place that believes in second drafts. In second chances. You are the pen I keep reaching for when the first paragraph feels too neat, too confident of its own arc. You are the margin where I scribble, try again, and remember the point of it all.

So here I am, paying attention. To the bakery that always runs out of the good bread at exactly 10:12. To the foghorn that dissolves heartbreak one vowel at a time. To the boy on the corner coaxing Bach from a thrift-store violin like it’s the last bird in the world. To the woman who writes poems on receipts and tapes them to the light pole, one for each passerby who forgot to be brave today. To the way your wind can strip me down to essentials and then hand me back to myself, warmed.

San Francisco, may I keep earning you. May I keep learning you. May we continue this practice: you, unbuttoning the horizon; me, showing up with a notebook and my whole unguarded heart. Let me love you the long way—not as a miracle that arrived perfect, but as a daily tenderness that insists on being tended. Let me stay porous to your fog, accountable to your people, and astonished by your light.

For the mornings when the city is a whisper and for the nights when it is a drum;
for the bridges I can see and the ones I can only feel beneath my feet;
for the work, the wonder, and the walk home—
thank you.

With love,

Jared ❤