I woke up today on the complete wrong side of the bed. Maybe it was the strange ultra-realistic dreams I had or maybe it was because I was sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, but regardless of the reason, I just couldn’t seem to do much except fake a smile through my whole day.
I checked out a few new pairs of glasses on the way back from Marin, wrote the numbers down on a piece of paper and then went home, unpacked and met an old friend for lunch over at the newly reopened Tu Lan.
The two of us talked work, what he was doing, what I was doing. I was working legal, he’d gone back over to the other side, both feet planted firmly back in cocaine. He’s a smart kid and keeps a low profile but it reminded me a little of what life was like ten years ago when I lived in the neighborhood and was up to the same sorts of things. We ate too much food, and then both stricken with the -itis, we stumbled towards our respective apartments, he towards the Tenderloin, me towards the Mission.
On the way back, I walked by my old studio on Market Street to see that they were gutting the bottom floor cafe for something newer. I walked into Kaplan’s to see what kind of hats they had for sale but the shelves were barer than I’d ever seen and the old man who owns the place looked as if he could barely move from behind the counter. Eventually, he’ll get too old or die and then another old San Francisco institution will disappear, just another memory of things past. I walked down Howard, past new condos where old lovers’ houses had once stood, down alleyways where old friends lived and partied and puked in the gutters. I wandered past homeless people I bought drugs from once upon a time, a bar I sat in during that citywide December blackout ten years past.
As unhappy as I was at times during those years, there was a sense of movement, which today lacked completely. Even when things were headed downwards, there was a sense that I was not in control, which felt liberating because I wasn’t responsible for what happened. Today I felt as though I was in control, just too paralyzed to move in any direction at all except that of moving one foot in front of the other until eventually I was standing at my front door.
I opened the door, a door I’ve opened so many times before and all I wanted to do was wrap myself up in my sheets and go to sleep and wake up a million miles away from everything.
Instead, I got a phone call from a friend, someone whose business I told to someone else without thinking, and just stared blankly at the wall while she told me how she felt about sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. I felt bad about it, but I already felt so horrible from all the flashbacks on my walk home that I barely felt any different when I hung up the phone. What I think of someone else’s actions doesn’t really matter, and she was right in being upset, but when you feel so separated from the person on the other end of the line, does it matter?
It’s all so… predictable.
What matters is that I can’t change the past, even the recent past. I think I may take a vow of relative silence for a couple of days, with the exception being on this blog. Late;y, it seems as if I can’t open my mouth without sticking my foot in it, so maybe I’ll just keep it closed entirely.
