Take Your self on a Date in San Francisco
I want you to have this note as permission to always celebrate you in whatever way you see fit during any single moment. Because I know you’re too humble — too exquisitely gracious and extraordinarily benevolent — to be so deservingly selfless to write this for your own use. Kindness is an evergreen construct that applies to those around us and ourselves. Please remember the latter part of that sentiment in those lower moments of the soul, cherished biped.
Sometimes getting our shit together isn’t actually about getting your shit together.
Dance in the living room to pop stars, the creak of hardwood floors now concerts of thankfulness; red wine meeting your lips, sweet as realized revenge against your hometown skeptics. Your mother’s ring inside your denim pocket rubbing against your outer thigh. What a life to be flush with the promise of shrinking regrets.
Take to the hills outside your apartment. Hold the midday sun like a long-lost friend. Those weekends when you come into the city, don’t forget to take the tiled stairs that lattice it like spines — each vertebra a step closer to a semblance of appreciation that, for some reason, didn’t exist before it. How we can be so intolerant of simple joys remains an anathema. I’m happy we’re at least working on it though, aren’t you?
There’s a certain, peculiar, unassuming feeling of self-satisfaction knowingly making a dinner reservation for one. Then buying a movie ticket for one. Then having a drink poured at a local dive bar for one. Then walking home, by yourself. This is not a lonely exercise, no. If anything, such a night out stands as a radical act of fondness for the autonomy you’ve so consciously crafted in your life. Meet yourself behind the mall.
Polish the dishes. Get your desk all sorted out. Respond to those unread text messages; realize they don’t need to be tailed by apologies. Buy that Dyson to rid your rent-controlled apartment of lint castles.
Sometimes getting your shit together isn’t actually about getting your shit together at all. It’s about putting pieces back together to remind yourself that you’re entitled to order, to discipline — tenderness, acceptance. And the mirrorball gaze of soft summer loves you haven’t met yet.
