Precisely Not I

I always sit here and scribe. It is one of the few places I can feel not here, not precisely in this city. I can stare down the wide boulevard with the old women in sweats scoffing and pretend I am back in another country where my mohawk is equally disdainful. The dogs barking in the distance are chasing me again like they did that summer of the new doberman next door. That wasn't here but rather in a suburb of green and turquoise and short, wide houses.

But as I sit here I am equally in another place not all together real. It is the memory of one branch that never happened, a simple future not meant to be. I pass him unnoticed in the night. I do not stop for early morning passion on the deserted streets. I keep walking to the bed of an ex-lover yet to leave. I sleep and dream of this day of ocean winds riding ahead of marine fog and old women scoffing. The sun skews perception: this is not precisely me. I am alone and writing but I am not looking up. My curiosity is for the hidden story on the page and not in the inquisitiveness of observation. I am not noticing the hideous mismatched stripes everywhere or the Giants' fan winking. Not I is scribbling some other story I cannot read or decipher.

But that is not me nor am I there. I am simply here with a bit of coffee left in the cup and a boy passin by in a hot pink t-shirt wearing a sparkly blue Diego backpack.

I like it here even with the scoffing women. I like how the sun casts long and the man preaching salvation keeps moving along. I like the briskness of afternoons in early fall captured between the ocean and the bay. It is magical here, and I can imagine. It is why I visit and remember the not to be futures: to feel.

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