Detritus - San Francisco

There's a charm to being frantic and uncollected in your post-grad years. It's expected. But only for so long. The statute of permissible dishevellment runs out shortly after your 27th birthday, and I am now in my thirtieth year. Whatever in life I thought I would be good at, if I have not by this age proved a talent, then I likely never will. 

There is still this beautiful youthful dream of possibility though it becomes each day crafted a bit more of memory and less of truth. Life becomes bounded at corners. You're indecisive. You are no visionary. By this point you were supposed to have written a book and learned Italian, been an admired and respected iconoclast, asked to speak at graduations of your alma mater. Every unpleasant setback was never more than just a temporary stay to your impending greatness, though you now suspect they may together have comprised the path you followed, and will themselves repeat in the coming distance.

The employment options you took which promised limited career prospects and minimal responsibility begin to appear thin and lusterless. The idea you had of making yourself a rounded individual by diversifying your skill through the employment you took calls upon you to answer the lingering question: are you rounded yet? Or will you always be in this protracted metamorphosis? You seem to always be becoming and you never just are, and not in some positive new-age spiritualist, life-is-change sense. Like a hatching egg half-committed.

Your friends make more selfish and more correct choices than to remain pot bound to your friendship. They leave for the best of reasons, for your self-involvement, your inability to see into the future, your lack of discipline. They couple off in more committed ways. They let theirs, and not your, narcissism determine their path. They get high paying jobs with benefits and commute to work from the suburbs, where they've taken up a mortgage. You're still making top ramen on a hot plate and sharing apartments with strangers to make rent.

You take again to drifting like a cellophane wrapper because it's something I can do well. Blowing about Telegraph Avenue, Ferry Terminal, Union Square, Ashby BART, and getting in the background of other people's photos, becoming wallpaper to their dreams. You melt into the urban detritus with the swirling dust and styrofoam cups into the faceless school which describes every city. Which is the city. A part of something greater and apart from something great.