Eureka is just a street

It happens often. Mostly whilst working on boring excel lists, full of names and numbers and such dry materials. It happens softly: my mind just drifts away and brings me in that indefinite space called memory, so impalpable yet so vividly real as to make me feel the warmth of sun beams on my arms during a tepid and cloudy late winter afternoon.

It happened just a few moments ago: cell F17, VLOOKUP and…swoosh, I am on Telegraph Hill, it´s late June and I am sweating because I surely know that San Francisco is all up and down, but I did not expect Telegraph HILL (yes, that could have been a hint, true) to be that high. I don´t know it yet, but this city has already absorbed all the love that I am pouring out of my elated heart, the love that some big hands are sadly incapable of holding. That this city is slowly becoming a necessary surrogate, I slightly sense already, but on the streets of San Francisco I don´t want to listen to anything else but the noise of traffic and the chit chat of Californian girls coming out of one of the perceived millions of Starbucks I see downtown. I want to inhale the dust of the stores of Chinatown, cramped with goods wrapped up in cellophane as some strange post-modern, urban bales. I only want to lightheartedly spend money and time in high-end stores at Union Square. After all, here everything seems so cheap and I am happy, I am a very special tourist killing time waiting for the working hours to pass so that I can go to the Mission and meet up with the friends. And then afterwards go home, that home that is not really mine, where I have been invited after a “hearthquake”, to pretend that things can be ok nonetheless. That home so fucked up that every sensible person would just run-Forrest-run, but where I nevertheless so much want to belong.That home on the hill, with the view of the Golden Gate and the many unhealed, itching scars. And the wild garden. And the white front porch with the wicker lovers ‘chair, where I had my vegan dinner on a mid-summer night, content and carefree, because he was sitting next to me.

That home on the corner to Eureka Street where the enthusiasm remains just the name on a sign, or even more just a distant illusion.

Cell F17, VLOOKUP. Back to the secure world. It might not be as exciting as the one of infedele memories but at least it´s not like constantly balancing on the brink of a precipice.