When in San Francisco

     It was a solemn, undisturbed summer, the summer that had materialized the city, that is, until the hippies came along. The Summer of Love in 1967 San Francisco went sort of like this: everyone was welcomed at first, but things eventually went sour as opportunists took advantage of other's trust. It hadn't been a long time since I had entered the city but the reason for this festival still became painfully obvious; there were loads of young hippies moving to San Francisco to escape the conformity of their parents generation. For them, it was attempt to re-imagine themselves into a whole another being. But no person can wear one face to himself, another to his family, and yet another to his society without being bewildered on which one is true. And so it was kind of an identity crisis for everyone and everything. Even the city.
    We all entered the movement, passing under the initiating banner that crucified one word, free. We weren't the first ones, or even the most successful to do such a thing, but we were the newest, and as as I learned, the most passionate. As I journeyed deeper into the city I found the need for a diary. It had no lock, but suddenly I had secrets to keep. To preserve the dreams of the hopeless artists who romanticized the city's roots a new sort of ideal arouse, who painted San Francisco as a lawless town, I had taken it upon myself to capture these moments of still serenity, disorderly chaos, and forged glamour. Looking back at those pictures I realized that I there were few moments in life where you could think and say there, that's when everything changed, and I had been a part of it. I was there when someone's dream came to life, or when their hopes perished. The Summer of Love created a deep divide into a before and after piece of American culture, and I had been in the middle ground.
     The heat was blistering, the air psychedelic, and the hippies entitled, and so in San Francisco I stayed (though not begrudgingly). Each day it became more clear to me that I could live my entire life in this city and still be unsatisfied at my death bed of how much more I could have explored the city. To us it wasn't so much a city as it was a station where 750,000 bipeds were placed. Simply peering out of my window gave me the loveliest view that the rest of America had never imagined to see.
     The buildings were complex, voluptuous, fascinating, and utterly and completely absurd. I had came to this city looking for poignant wonders that didn't disappoint, in the teeming labyrinths of forgotten archaic sidewalks and piers, that stemmed from the equally forgotten corners and squares, and those peeking behind the large gaping towers that insisted on never being forgotten. But it was in the festival that I found the best view of all, the view of an empty road waiting for me to travel on it. It wasn't the straight line to the coast that I was set on before the summer, but a chance to rest in back end towns, worn out cities, and hackneyed crevices.
     The whole of our lives are just the combination of individual images that we continuously pass like towns from a train. But sometimes the train stops by the towns, as an image stuns us. This was how San Francisco was for me, the summer settled, everything stopped and it was just me and San Francisco, staring at each other in wonder. As fall arrived I had left the city, and with me the imagination went. But it was still vibrant in my memory, a time I would always cherish. I'll  never that summer, because it was the beginning of always. I was born in 1945, but I became alive in 1967, in the Summer of Love.