Welcome...Home?

Our Bed & Breakfast

 “You have to get lost before you can be found.”― Jeff Rasley

We drove and drove and I impatiently awaited the first sign of my new life in the distance. I expected the first sight to be like eye contact across the room—shy but sure. And I expected to feel like I was jumping. But when I first did see the city, traffic threw that jump into suspenseful slow motion. I stared at my snow globe come to life and I knew the real thing was about to shatter that little world.
It is surreal to look at a place for the first time and know that it is already home. I tried to force myself to love every part of it.  But the skyscrapers seemed not a collection of guardians like mountains, but like huge staring strangers that sensed me in their midst. Wherever my family ate, wherever we stopped, I wondered if I would return. I nervously regarded every street and assured myself that with time, the city would open up. Or I would open up to it.

So after a day of fighting for parking on Fisherman’s Wharf, racing flocking tourists for a sunset view from Coit Tower, and photographing myself with the city (with the stranger across the room I’d thought I wanted to talk to), we ended up at our bed and breakfast. Escaped from the coils of the city, I encountered the strangeness of Painted Ladies. They are the clothing of an eccentric city, the perfect setting to a colorful Wes Anderson movie. I could not help wondering what personalities filled those bright, bold, ornate walls. My first San Francisco specimen was the owner of the B&B. A man who has devoted his later years to the intricate mini reproduction of historical furniture. Lining the walls were doll size cupboards, ovens, closets, typewriters. 

Part of the view from my window

Desperate to enter a bigger world quite literally, I couldn’t wait to return to my university. To reaffirm the reason I was there, to claim my reserved place, to begin what a summer of fantasizing had yielded. I rushed my family to the campus, beat all the lines, and was the second on my floor to move in. It left me time to look around. To feel the school. Every corner of it oozes a kind of gold pulse, and it’s more than just the paint job. It is in a perpetual state of hugging, open arms. And it seems willing to share its beauty, which increases in my esteem every time I see it. 

From Salt Lake to the sharp waters and wits of my second city. From miniature furniture to my university. I am undeniably intimidated by the world I have sought out to be mine. I am lost before being found. But I’m going to dance with this stranger, walk the streets until they are mine, and look at my snow globe in a new way.