just like heaven
on dreaming
I knew what heaven was. It was attainable, and simple, and I could experience it in the summertime and Friday nights. Heaven was being home without thinking about going anywhere. Heaven was a Coke float and a piping hot cheese pizza, a late night playing Halo 3 with my brother, sleeping in the next morning. I didn’t dream big back then, I didn’t need to — my imagination didn’t extend beyond the heaven that I got to experience regularly. The future didn’t matter very much. Why would it? I had everything.
Maybe my childhood was idyllic enough that I didn’t need to have big dreams of a drastically different life. I looked for what I needed to do to feel stable and comfortable, and thought a lot less about existential questions about big audacious dreams to achieve. Like most bright kids in school, I saw my life as a series of checkboxes — good grades to get to a good college to get to a good job. I picked the university that would give me less debt (reduce chances of instability) and then started to look for what would come next.
My brother lived in San Francisco by this time, and for a week or two every year, I flew by myself (a recent phenomenon at that point) to the City by the Bay to crash on his couch in the Mission. I had found a new heaven. I spent my days exploring the city, following a list of locations that he gave me, and we’d spend every night eating together, hanging out with his friends, and playing more video games. Compared to the constrained life in the suburbs and campus life, San Francisco felt like freedom, a promise that the world could be so much bigger than I had ever imagined. A city could be a dream.
An ideal life appeared in my mind, built on small moments from these trips: going to bar trivia for the first time, eating cinnamon toast on Ocean Beach, walking through the Victorians, watching the fog consume the city. So much amazing food, cuisines that I’d never known, a life that I had never considered.
Back at school, the vision of this life in San Francisco drove me. I wonder how many hours I spent in my free time building portfolios and applying to jobs back then, all with the single-minded goal of creating a career that could get me back out there. Every summer break was spent in an air-conditioned office, every free hour adding another row to my job search spreadsheet. After graduation, I had accepted a job offer I didn’t want in Austin, TX, and felt a lump in my throat when people asked me what came next.
I wonder if I would’ve moved to Austin if my mother hadn’t told me that it was okay to renege on that job and keep looking for something in San Francisco. Would I have always looked back in regret? Would I have ever experienced the joy of receiving an offer in San Francisco a couple of weeks later? Or the floating feeling when I arrived in the city as a new resident a month later?
Those first few months, there were no clouds in the Mission. The sky was perpetually a purple pink sunset. I had done it. I had reached my idea of heaven once again, one where the weather never changed, where I could live with my brother again, where the burritos were plentiful. After only a few months, I told my friend that I could see myself living in the city forever. He laughed, and told me that we’d see. You never know how things change.
Five years later, life was different. A pandemic had changed the world, had changed San Francisco. Many of my friends from the beginning of my stay had left the city, many of my new friends were settling down with their partners. I was still comfortable, but was comfort enough for a full life? At 27?
As I thought about these things, I took a trip to New York for a few days, and felt 19 again. I had found heaven, again. The warmth of the sun felt unfamiliar after the foggy days in San Francisco, the electric pace of the populace invigorating. Puzzle pieces of another life started to appear in my mind: watching tennis players at the Fort Greene benches, Shazam-ing playlists at Pause Cafe, watching strangers improvise together at the jazz club with ease, eating at one of many aesthetically pleasing Sichuan restaurants, hobnobbing with artists.
It’s been two years since that trip. I’ve lived in New York for 15 months now. I live the life of my dreams — I’ve found love, I walk through beautiful parks, flower-filled trees, brownstones, my palate is satiated. But New York is a different type of city. Filled with romantics who all dreamt of moving here, ambition doesn’t stop with the move. There is no next city to dream of moving to, not for me. Now what?
I read award-winning novels by New York-based authors describing places I see every day, I attend writing classes and workshops, I try to dream of becoming a great writer, stacks of books emblazoned with my name. But the images are blurry. They don’t piece together into anything.
On one of the first warm afternoons in a while, I go to a restaurant with my girlfriend on a Thursday night. The menu has all sorts of American comfort food, like mozzarella sticks and $11 Coke floats. I pause, but decide against it, afraid of ruining a memory and of spending $11 on Coca-Cola and ice cream. Instead, we order a slice of carrot cake as the sun sets. We people watch and take pictures of the purple-pink sky. The cake is heavenly.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
ALBUM - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me by the Cure - I mean, what did you expect?
POEM - “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop - I stared and stared / and victory filled up / the little rented boat
Note: I recently discovered that my email has been marking replies to my letters as Spam. So if I never replied to one of your replies, I’m sorry! It might’ve been lost.
This is gorgeous