Made it back up. It was a good quick visit to SF... next time I hope to have a bit more lesure time to see friends and stuff. This was more or less all business. Sucessful business, so that's nice, but still.
The dive was good for my mind I think, both legs solo. I have all these memories of roads, of biking down Broadway late at night in that deserted stretch in the 20s, of the steep downhill to Denver on I-70 as you break free of the mountains, of various routes I've taken to various schools, and to see women before. There's something about the experience of moving down a given piece of path when you've done it a few times in a few different states of mind. It's a touchstone for a whole lot of different feelings.
I'm having this whole separation experience from New York lately. For the first time I'm living somewhere else, thinking of calling another place "home." The times I've been away from the city in my adult life have generally been transitory. The longest stretch was when I was working on Music For America, at which point "home" was my cubicle, and I had a nice place to sleep and occasionally to party in the Mission. But that was campaigning; it was never a life, which is probably why it didn't work out for me. And after that I came back to the city.
I miss it, but not as much or as immediately as I thought. I miss it a little like like I miss my first girlfriend, who I was most purely in love with (in New York!), who I can still conjure theoretical passions for, but who I've completely accepted won't really be part of my life ever again. Not that I won't ever go back to NYC (clearly I must, and often), but at this point the idea that I might not continue to have a permanent address there has penitrated my being, and it feels... ok.
