People as places as people.

"It's hard to get hold of, and hard to let go.
Always something we look for from the day we were born.
Instead, we're the people that we wanted to know,
And we're the places that we wanted to go.
Yeah, we're the places that we wanted to go." - Modest Mouse

" 'No man,' said one of the Greeks, 'loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.' " - C.S. Lewis


It was my senior year of high school, so I must have been seventeen, but looking back it seems far longer. I feel I was much smaller then.

I was using my mother's camera, her metal Nikon from the '70s, and only now, typing these words, I realize she might have used it to photograph the same views when she lived here, the same sights that I was visiting then. Our nearly identical green and yellow eyes looking out the same viewfinder to frame the same concrete, twenty some years apart.

The photographs were in black and white; they had to be as I was developing them myself at our high school's makeshift dark room, and I guess I remember the photographs more than the place itself because in my memory the Palace of Fine Arts had the whitewash of Athenian ruins topped in dark grey rather than its actual maple and nougat tones. And it was atop one of the city's many hills, overlooking countless townhouses rising from pavement frozen in undulation. But really, I was recalling the view from Telegraph Hill, or from the apex of Lombard Street, rather than on the water by the Presidio. Returning now, ten years later, to a city I'd been to so often growing up, I was able to see familiar sights with unfamiliar eyes. I was able to see the details that my memory had stored falsely, and to be drawn anew to other virtues I'd glossed over. That decade of absence had been a decade of influence, and with my interests and perspective changed, the variable could now to return to the constant to measure its own deviation. Recognize its progress. See the spots on the map where allure and boredom had traded places. I could see the path I had taken by seeing the city once again.

But that was only a little of it.

I thought that I came to San Francisco to make it easier on Jeffrey and Aaron. As a thank you for their trip down to L.A. when I visited last September, I would come up to the Bay this time around and try to talk other friends in to coming up as well. Our core group of six friends from those immediate post-college years in Los Angeles is now scattered thanks to the three of us. I left in July 2009 for New York, via the world, and they each chose Northern California shortly after.

People continue to ask me if I'll ever move back to Los Angeles, and I've always answered No... That I love New York. True, but only partially the answer. I belong in New York because it fits me; who I feel I am now, and who I want and strive to be. It is a city that, like no other I've ever experienced, pushes you, constantly, to be simply... better. Smarter, wittier, more charming, more culturally aware. I relish this challenge that New York forces upon me, even if the results are subjective, and vary depending on who you ask. But none of this explains the missing part of that answer: the lack of lasting guilt that I felt for leaving Los Angeles. After moving, I had homesickness. Pangs of, if not remorse, then at least of wanting to exist in two places simultaneously. But except for birthdays, or occasional concerts, those are gone now. That burden was lifted and I never thought to ask by whom. I realized this weekend that my friends had unknowingly taken parts of it with them to their new homes. By leaving soon after me, Los Angeles would always be a setting for some of the best casual memories of my life, but no longer the place that I had to live if I wanted to make new ones. By following their own desires, they'd given me far more freedom than they could ever realize.

Seeing Jeffrey and Aaron over the past few days, along with Corey, another member of that disassembled band, was phenomenal, and despite 7 months of being apart, we picked up like it was a weekend away. But it wasn't like old times. It was somehow even more natural. We were finally us. Seeing my friends again, I recognized that they were more than just filled with potential, they were now well on their way towards achieving it. They were more themselves than I had ever seen them, and it was the city of San Francisco that was doing so much to make this happen. Personality alchemy. Juxtaposing what makes a city great, with what makes my friends the amazing people that they are, and watching that marriage become mutually beneficial. They fit there like they would nowhere else, and coming home to New York, I know that I love the Bay Area now not for what I saw back as an adolescent, or a teenager about to leave the comfort of high school, or even solely for its own merits, but really for what it is bringing out in them. So part of why I love San Francisco is part of why I love DC, or Los Angeles for my friends that are thriving there, where some of them truly do belong. Inevitably this means we're destined to be spread out, dots on an unfolding map. But it also means I have the potential to become the same sort of destination to them. The inevitable New Yorker of the group. The brutally honest, hyperbolic, less-than-patient, and yes Aaron, occasionally pretentious one.

There are scores of chasms that form in your mid-to-late twenties. Friends and lovers once inseparable totally dissipate. It's at this point each person becomes the individual they truly are, and opens his eyes to see all the new distance between himself and those that had been around. The natural tendency is to see that alienation, that gaping emptiness, to have that become your focus. Obviously, those ruptures have happened to me in two years of near-exile, across the country from most people I know. But it's all endurable once you see the ones that have moved closer. Because that motion is genuine. It would have to be since it's natural. It's what they saw when they opened their eyes as well.

I used my own Canon Rebel T2i to shoot the Palace of Fine Arts on Saturday afternoon. Irwin was reaching over a chain in a vain attempt to hug a swan, Jeff and Aaron looking around out of brightly-colored Wayfarers, all of us trading instantly-forgotten jokes fueled by the bottomless Mimosas we'd been downing the past hour. We walked around, all inevitably awed by how beautiful the structure was. Even more striking than I remember it being from years ago. And a hell of a lot happier too.