Oh, San Francisco.
The first time I saw the City by the Bay was in 1984; I was nineteen years old, and the man who showed me the city was to become my one true love.
We had been conducting a long-distance pen-pal relationship via letters during my freshman year of college at Boston University and had not acknowledged that we were having anything other than a friendship.
After a series of disastrous decisions that ended with me dropping out and becoming homeless, I took a plane to LA and stopped briefly at my grandmother's in Santa Barbara. She had an ask-no-questions-make-no-judgments open-door policy, for which I was grateful. From her musty-smelling living room, I called Mike on her wall-mounted phone with the long curly cord; it was the first time I’d spoken to him since he gave me his address on Kauai, and I left for college. In the intervening year, he’d moved to California while I went off to sight-unseen Boston with unrealistic stars in my eyes.
"Did you mean what you said about s…
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