San Francisco

The clouds slip slowly down from the sky, clutching desperately onto the buildings that jut into the blue and reach hopefully towards God.

On a hill, cluttered close like too many teeth in too small a mouth, their roots hugging tight to the ground as if they’re terrified of letting go, like they might slide slowly down the hill and into the unknown future or backwards into the, god-forbid, desolate and unfashionable past.

Roads wind down, lazily forming side streets, cutting corners like manic taxi drivers in a rush to nowhere really, carving out a slice of solemn-as-a-preacher-black in between the fruit-pie colored pastel that cloaks the houses on the hills like a breezy summer dress.

Two men, playing checkers, chicken-bone fingers plucking ivory bone pieces, hunched over their chess game, bent over by life. Like the burdens they’d carried in their years had been much heavier then their frail frame had allowed and had slowly yet deliberately pressed all the spirit out of them, deflating, pushing out vitality one fatal step at a time. Like a child squeezes a balloon under his fists, slowly letting the air escape until all that is left is a husk that floats eerily away on the wind and leaves forgotten.

Rat-a-tat. A beggar broken by the side of the road, legs crossed, eyes down, resigned to his fate. You would step over him, pass right by him, not even notice him. Rat-a-tat. Except for the quiet rhythm that his begging cup tattoos on the cold night air. Coins against plastic Rat-a-tat. Subtle but distinct. His heart-beart, his pulse, his middle-finger to life that though it has kicked him in the gutter, he lives. He breathes. He is society’s lowest. He is still here.

Life has been good to her, pampering, spoiling, feeding her choicest tidbits and dainty morsels that she’s snapped up in a heart-beat because food is comfort and food is love and food is safe. Her flesh, once so supple, (she had been a fine woman in earlier years), now bulges and testifies to her newfound religion: one that does not believe in self-denial nor, consequently, preach a doctrine of exercise or restraint.

Snapshots of people and places, chapters of lives, completely opposite yet more similar than any of them will ever know. Too many faces to count, too many to even remember. Each a story weaving together to create a city –their city—that hides itself in the fog and welcomes strangers with a misty cold kiss.