The outside slips along: the suburban homes and weed-cracked white pavements (still can’t bring myself to say sidewalk), the wide streams of traffic that splinter through clapboard and eucalyptus, the narrow concrete pillars of the freeway, the Ikea store, and then the water. So linear and reassuring. Stripes of blue and grey like the white venetian blinds that stretch and collapse my windows morning and night.
The bay bridge’s posts stutter past the bus window and the pale sea silhouettes passengers' heads. Then come the buildings, comforting sentries of the city. The skyscrapers of the Financial District are an emblem of wealth disparity and gentrification, yet they're also a friendly greeting, an invitation in. They are waiting to hug you with their height and their familiar smoky-grey cityishness.
'Go out into your nows,' our American Poetry professor said to us at the end of his first lecture.
The same way people need to stand on a cliff and breathe country air, I need that lungful of the city, rows of windows running way up above my head, urban noise billowing about bottom floors, traffic, people, coffee and noodles and exhaust fumes, movement: feeling nestled in now.
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