You love by night - by crescent (and full) moons, by chilling breezes, by sparkling stars, by sparkling souls. By night, your secrets run loose, unguardedly released in your drunken haze. (Night intoxicates you - mind, soul, heart. This is not something you can help.) The darkness makes you feel both safe and vulnerable - a blanket and an open expanse - and so you are wrapped and exposed all at once.

You are braver at night, and by way of being braver, more foolish as well. You say and do things in the night you would never during the day, under the light, when people look and see you as you appear (as opposed to in the dark, when people look and see you, just you). The night manipulates you into making raw gut choices and daring to risk and stripping yourself of caution, much like a healthy dose of booze but a little more classy.

But you do not hold grudges, because in the end, the night is sweeter. It is sweeter and it is stronger and it is freedom and it is terrifying and it makes you feel things you do not understand - hopeless contradictions and ambiguous blurs and it is sharp and clear and misty and cloudy and you don’t get it, not at all, but God, is it not the best thing?

You love in silhouettes, and in shadows. You love above dewy grass and damp, scattered pine needles, through soft, whistling winds and the cyclic prattling of insomniac crickets. You love with wider eyes, peering to find the stories hidden underneath flickering street lights. You love across gleaming rivers. Across seas. Across worlds.

They say the night brings you love, but really the night brings you life.

“Good days. They come around the oddest corners.” - Colum McCann

Yesterday was good even though you did not wake up thinking it would be. And those are the best days, you think, the ones that surprise you. Yesterday was good for no spectacular reasons - good company, good weather, good vibes, from start to finish.

You missed these.

You’re happy. And how often can you so easily say that?

Sometimes I don’t believe in staying happy if only because finding happiness, that’s the best feeling - far surpassing any kind of consistency. And I would take a little darkness if that meant I could later watch the lights rise, because sometimes the sad days, those are just there to remind me that there are better days, and these better days are coming, and when they do, well, excuse the cliche but that is as priceless as it gets, for me anyway.

You want it so badly that you turn things that are not into things that seem to be. Doesn’t matter what, circumstances increasingly irrelevant - you just want to fill the craving (dare we say void?).

It’s not real. Maybe none of this has been real, was ever real.

You miss the shyness.

It’s not there anymore. All you want to do is drown in it, but it’s not there.

We spend our entire lives crossing lines but then one day it actually means something, hits that soft spot we’re so used to covering, and we freeze.

This one is a little harder.

 

You want to know my greatest challenge?

And we’re packing again. Being here, being there - that you don’t mind, you could never mind. That you love. It’s the coming and going that sucks. It’s that damn bittersweet feeling you thought you had bled all out last spring, but it just keeps flowing back in and you’ll be damned if it doesn’t course right through you.

You understand very well that heavy settling means heavy uprooting, and that is why long stays give and take. It’s emotional turmoil even though you know it should not be, even though you know it’s only the drumroll that is a bit sad, and not the actual performance.

It reminds you of her, and how it’s four years gone and you still do not know how to cope with her absence, how you are still searching for better ways to be sad. You have realized, though, that it is not so much her absence that makes you feel lonely, but her absence topped off with the feeling of being left behind.

So the truth comes out. Insecurity #307 and #308, respectively: You fear being left behind; you do not like being away. But where are you really away from when you are home in all places?

It hurts like loss even though it isn’t, and you’ll be damned once more if that doesn’t scare you.

The best kind of goodbyes hold no regrets.

2011 did not give me much, but in 2011 I gave to myself - wrapping up, starting new, strengthening of the “lifts-you-higher”, disposing of the cancers, active doing, hurting, healing, pouring out, taking in, falling down, standing up. 2011 treated me to rewards for everything I always thought about giving up on but never did, to reasons to keep fighting, to a Kodak end to senior year, to high school graduation and to a hazy summer with the best people. 2011 gave me UCLA, and everything that came and is to come with that. 2011 was development, growing to the point I could feel it, doing things for me, realizing what mattered, embracing emotions, finding magic. 2011 was tearing apart and breaking down in order to piece back better, it was discovery, it was understanding you, it was understanding me.

This year doesn’t read in highlights, but in fusions, and this seems to make it easier not only to pocket and carry, but also to leave.

No regrets, and still, here we are, hoping or even knowing the best is yet to come. May this year’s bests be next year’s worsts.

Hi, 2012.

Every year, but it never gets old.

It takes a San Francisco December to make you feel the holidays. Like, really feel. Not just that stressful rush to buy the perfect gifts and then wrap them just as neatly or that gleeful and relieved welcome of a long-awaited vacation, but the intensely euphoric feeling that the soulful amalgamation of holiday music and lights and winter and pure spirit ignite. You understand this feeling as December in San Francisco. You don’t really know what the holidays feel like without San Franciscan snowflake lights and decorated wreaths and street music and that tall, stumblingly illuminated tree with the little red star on top. You need a San Francisco Christmas for it to truly feel like Christmas.

It is this city (among other things, of course) that reminds you why you have loved growing up here, that reminds you why you could never leave for too long. Eighteen years and you still have not had enough time to take in the sparkling bay and stretching bridges, the overwhelming fog and the constant, busy hustle… the live street music, the steep, sloping hills, the unfailing bell chimes, the smelly wooden piers surrounded by rippling water (the water.. You can’t imagine not being around water), the clicking of shoe heels, the random Union Square dance offs with the Jesus Christ Loves You picket sign wandering peacefully in the background, the clutched and brightly colored shopping bags, the seasonal ceramic hearts, the squealing fieldtrip groups, the double-decker tour busses and accompanying large cameras, the grassy parks, the ferry rides, the jingle of the cable cars, and the very contours of the towering buildings that gather to make up the most beautiful day and night skyline you think you will ever see, if only because this is the skyline that raised you.

Oops. I think I left my heart.