On a Hawi, Big Island Hawai’i morning walk, the sun rises around 6 am.

Gentle disclaimer: myriad topics huddle in free-floating essay

Calling the ex in a sultry mood never seems like a profitable idea. And I am wondering then if returning to San Francisco, even briefly, like just the one phone call to the ex, for an afternoon tryst is wise. In so many ways, this city lasts as my first love relationship. The lesbian kind. Remember that genre in life that qualifies as queer—in my case being born in a female physiology that reacts to another female so well for emo romance-trances, sexual forays, and shared finances? Any two of these are often in smooth and happy adventure mode while often one can spike “issues.” Two out of three ain’t bad, as Meatloaf’s song lyrics lament for his lost love.

Even presumably straight men like Meatloaf can be lonely so I commiserate well since the lesbian leap can be forlorn in emotional texture, too, yet perhaps more so—I humbly claim—than my hetero buddies. For one, we lezbos are turned into demeaning grammar dumps. If anyone is straight and reading this essay, my question is whether you have been called “a straight” in your life? With the article “a” there, what follows becomes a noun—a person, a place, or a thing, true, yet the tone implies an object: a lampshade, a lighthouse, a lesbian. If someone goes there, as in “are you a straight?” I gently suggest returning the conversation to basic grammar, the key elements of speech. Aren’t we adjectives rather than implied objects—all messy (quite different than messed up, yes?) in our descriptors?

Gay men even get the syntax pass since most queer males are asked, “hey, are you gay?” rather than are you “a gay?” Seems straight and gay men, allies of mine as they are, I hope, qualify for different grammar echelons than lezbos do. Maybe a privilege thing and who knows.

Truth is that my adjectives multiply each year as I age, for I am frugal, pudgy, cantankerous, lesbian, ethical, and frumpy. After reading this essay, you might add a few to the list. Fingers crossed some are positive.

The bizarre twist seems that as I feel the word “a” objectifies my lesbianness, and perhaps this is done by straight folks, I myself have needed to unlearn treating women as objects, especially sexual ones. In most of my lesbian relationships, I thought that virtually sex alone would make, keep, and improve us. Turns out not to be true. What I appreciate is Jennifer Beals comment that sex is an expression of emotion. Who knew?

This is the actor Beals, the one who plays Bette Porter on The L Word, the Netflix show that changed lesbian portrayal from cardboard one dimensional sketching to complex 360-degree perspectives depicting lesbian culture. We became visible. And now I am learning how to practice emotions—the feel, texture, and action of them—in more open, sophisticated ways. Each day adventures into a full vulnerable life.

This skip-skip-skip down resentment lane, as concerns language and more, becomes relevant when I think of San Francisco, the two decades I cozied up to her. Since the City stays comfortably known as one urban gay mecca, makes me curious why after starting several lesbian relationships in SF, the confident coming out that I have now happens more easily in rural Hawai’i space? Relationship bonding to self, first, and then, as a result, to another woman while living in urban space is a Bay Area foggy chase that I never could complete. Like the article “a” objectifying me through language dynamics, or so I perceive anyway, in one of my common resentment churning efforts, the urban cement sidewalk built a distanced life, keeping a firewall around myself.

The city’s cool demeanor gave me permission to seldom let another lezbo into my life for partnership. Mind you, several queer relationships did wrap my life. Yet I moved lightly in the  emo dance experience by simply living the urban busy-busy in San Francisco—the saunter, crawl, traipse, sprint, inhale, and nibble of her urban streets. And they are intimate, for sure.

On a Schwinn one speed bike, rusty in spots but wide handlebars give steering easy muscle, a crescendo in speed increases as I pedal down Montgomery Street in the financial district. Before I began riding this way through San Francisco’s downtown concrete lanes as a bike messenger, an epiphany found me at the kitchen sink. One full glass of Pinot Noir stands near me on my right side while I listen.

An intuitive message arrives that at 30 years old the time to stop drinking like an alcoholic, as I had been doing since I was 13 years old, is now. I pour the expensive wine down the sink and continue to not drink for nine and a half years. Not a single drop of alcohol. To navigate this radical change during the first year, I became a bike messenger. And accounts for why I still need to practice emotions because recovered alcoholics find feelings similar to an E.T. moment. Remember the scene where the young kid discovers the apparent “monster,” in reality a cuddly alien oddball and the two figure out how to communicate? My emotions can seem like the “monster” (i.e. cuddly, oddball alien feelings) and even as an adult, I can feel like an awkward youth, figuring out how to communicate with them. Welcome to how folks in sobriety tic-toc. We can overdo feeling-states and then some.

San Francisco’s entire city stretches over a miniscule 45 square geographic miles. She becomes a tight urban umbrella to shield city dwellers from hustling daylight business activity and then the dark of night nefarious operations. From drinking alcohol with street dwellers at 3 a.m. in the Tenderloin to conversing with folks living in extreme financial wealth, completing the contract for housekeeping to clean their Pacific Heights mansion, I have seen much in San Francisco.

But on a bicycle, all is graceful air. San Francisco’s downtown zone encompasses biking routes for swift travel and arrival—which is how the packages transport in the messenger bag slung over my shoulder.   “341, all clean?” the dispatcher cackles in walkie-talkie code, asking if all prior deliveries are complete, and am I ready now for the next three. On a long rectangular pad, I quickly jot down the three new start and finish locations. My walk-talkie stays precisely at the top of my shoulder for a quick listen on new directions as I bike even faster than I thought the old-fashioned bike, a $20 thrift store purchase, could muster. This spare equipment of delivery bag, radio, address writing pad, and u-shaped bike lock makes possible my earning $450 a week, the check cashed to deliver real dollars in my palm. Plenty locations to spend the money.

San Francisco pockets neighborhood cultures like an insecure street urchin, bless her heart. Walking inside any one of them creates an illusion of this one village as the only one in the entire city. Resourceful, kind-hearted folks often stay in their neighborhood, just where they are, because enough community fuels an entire life in that vicinity. The Castro signifies a gay mecca—often affluent white male—through restaurants, the majestic Castro movie theater, and queer bars. Just up the hill is Noe Valley where expensive Victorian houses, well-manicured parks with swings, and elite dining bring wealthy parents raising children. This hood remains almost all-Caucasian.

Off Market Street and onto Franklin, a one-way street that quickly transverses the entire city, brings you to North Beach. Many cozy cafes serve an immaculate cappuccino and garlicky Italian food. Interspersed in this business-thriving density are apartments above the diverse eateries. People live in the beautiful urban mayhem. Lucky me that I have had a cup of coffee, a meal, and a conversation in each neighborhood, many times.

Walking distance from North Beach is Chinatown. Around 70,000 people live inside these few urban blocks. In one- or two-bedroom apartments, three generations reside: children, parents, and grandparents. Some will never learn to speak English because the need is not there. Native languages, perhaps Mandarin or Cantonese, other than English thrive here. A few decades ago, I stumbled into a small restaurant where whole roasted ducks were hanging on thick shiny metal hooks.

The plate of steamed white rice and roast duck that I ordered back then became a favorite, so my 11-year-old son and I returned on our afternoon visit this winter 2021, a few days before Christmas. The same hole-in-the wall restaurant has remained open over the decades. Eating that duck saturated in tangy fat juice yet keeping crispy charred skin, will forever remain like the memory dynamic that the madeleine cookie evokes for Proust. For me, this Chinatown roast duck is San Francisco.

These are surface descriptions, still. What I omit are complex demographics in each neighborhood: diverse languages, myriad age groups, schools, hybrid cuisines, architecture, activism, fashion styles, churches, synagogues, sanghas, temples, politics, shifting economics, artists’ influence, racial segregation and so much more as history shape-shifts each one.

And sitting in a café in any select neighborhood, so many fascinating conversations would begin. Yet for an addiction prone temperament like mine, especially when I was in the bars pounding one beer pint after another, I kept the connections light, on the surface, and temporary. With endless choices on where to adventure for the day, staying distant while sitting next to someone at the café counter remained easy the years I lived in San Francisco. Maybe that is the crux of my urban life and why I less often felt like I belonged to any one neighborhood. Under the umbrella of city overwhelm, finding ways to commit became a challenge. Dodging my growing up years, around 25 to 40 years old, the honesty to do so, came easy as one busy urban day after the next filled with activity. Excessive drinking sure whiles away time. Keep in mind some exterior exhibits of maturity did occur as in earning a Masters degree, purchasing real estate, and mentoring learners as an English Professor. Yet on the interior, the E.T. moment continues as I work to improve my less than deft skills to understand and express emotion.

Perhaps for this reason, the departing energy that I get from San Francisco feels like the one that visits me when I look at Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks, the languid urban late-night space inside the 1942 frame. A couple and one waiter dwell there, and one lone customer sits to the side at the counter in a classic American diner; he occupies one of the swivel stools at a long-long wood counter.

Maybe he slices through a tall pie wedge; for sure nearby rests a cup of coffee on the shiny wood. The hues of sallow yellow, dark grey, and leaden brown all imply inertia, an emotional hovering away from intimacy, perhaps even from self.  

On my San Francisco visit, I saw a similar figure riding the city bus up Judah Street. I went to exit through the heavy glass door of a classic urban doughnut bakery. Coffee steamed in a tall cup I held while balanced in the other hand is a wax paper bag, eight weighty doughnuts inside. The bakery interior design is spacious, one long glass-covered display after another of multiple varieties of baker’s delights, almost vast quantities compared to offerings I am now familiar with in small rural bakeries in Hawai’i.

Juggling coffee cup and doughnut bag, I shoulder push the door open. Exactly on this corner at Judah and 10th Avenue, an avalanche of metal called a city bus takes the corner, turning just beyond where I stand, around the sidewalk curb. The sound used to be a screechy metal cacophony yet now with electric busses we have smoother whooshes of air and effort and beyond the bus windowpane sits a lone rider on the bus, no passengers nearby, and this dusk time lights the sunset shadows smearing yellow, grey, and brown together at random.

Does a forlorn question stab the bearded fellow’s face? Anybody out there he seems to ask another stranger, this human, me, through his stare. What I project onto this stranger had become my own distance from self, missing a core honesty to work at sobriety more vigorously so most areas of my life could mature—like confidently coming out as lesbian (the adjective, rather than “a lesbian”). As I felt lonely from myself, I saw lonely stares in others that perhaps I exaggerate—the art of projecting.

Yet aren’t we consistent for going to the arts to source emo bounces, a pinch of jumpy energy that still reassures us? One of the most inspiring nexus spots, the connecting x that movie watching gifts us, arrives when Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood) finally returns to his favorite rural café Ira’s Diner for a slice of homemade lemon pie in the film Million Dollar Baby. Fate brings startling metamorphosis for taciturn Frankie, who rarely mumbles more than a few words to anyone. An emotional leap happens like starlings determined flying, the high-high swoops that go into graceful turns at full speed, when Frankie agrees to mentor the female boxer Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). He travels from one urban city to the next as the young female boxer’s coach, and by the film’s ending, Frankie dreams of his cottage nestled in the woods after a lifetime of coaching boxers in Los Angeles.

Seems necessary to watch the entire movie for the full range of searing emotions. For now, accurate to describe Frankie occupying his seat at the diner as an intricate emo decision. Meaning that my guesses on how an individual arrives to and claims a café seat or bench on a bus are going to be off.  Maybe the rider on the bus had spooky eyes for reasons I will never know. Too true.

Blessings are that in this rural spot where now I live, the rush-rush of city life is absent. Nature brings an ease, a presence, an easygoing mana (energy) that often makes for thoughtful friendships and diverse conversations during the day. The social connection is easier. Do I stretch too far on interpreting nature’s nurturing environment as female-like? Stereotypes can rush in. So, I am careful with these words that I write to not exclude. Everyone belongs, for sure. Yet if I continue with the claim of nature as exuding the nurturing feminine then I can understand better why my lesbian side develops in Hawai’i, more so than in urban space.

All that I write stays open to critique, for sure. Can we as readers of this prose, stay open? I always value what Seth Rogen says about movies he makes that celebrate the devil-may-care white male adolescence, the privilege in those storylines. The right to act so dastardly. He claims that if the movie is off-putting, then watch something else. I hope you stay to read this essay even if the prose seems to limit some. That is not my intention.

Simply that the writing reaches inside me to understand better why I feel more like my lesbian self in Hawai’i. If urban frenetic angst seems hetero or male-like, then lesbian mode might be especially valuing peaceful days in nature. Careful am I to not set up the binary of either urban (male) or nature (female). We live on a continuum, true.

Walt Whitman does so in his Leaves of Grass. Shedded in nature’s beauty, he found the quiet exuberance a walk outside catapults for human experience and, at times, compares this emotional opening to sexual energy. In this way, he truly does contain multitudes, one being his gay physical self. Just saying that perhaps urban experience affords this transcendence less easily.    

And still San Francisco does not begrudge me a short visit to say hello briefly. Likely I will return for short excursions to her urban streets so intimate to me. Yet growing up into our adulthood establishes boundaries and mine are that San Francisco gifted me so many pleasures and pains that will shape my life for good. But I have left this geography now.

Still, I am glad I called the ex, or in this case, visited San Francisco for a short while. Visiting a former attempted lesbian-love geography translates well to my rural life. Towering skyscrapers, car alarms screeching, and foul air surfacing from a sidewalk steel-grate vent are radical contrasts to vibrant green grass for endless acres, mellow cacophony of bird chirp and insect hum, plus fresh air scented by flowers. Venturing back to San Francisco brought me enough memory to revalue where I live now.

Walking outdoors on aina (land) morphs everyone as equals, so that sitting at the American diner counter seat, eating pie alone, happens less. For even if you are walking by yourself on the land, so many companions will forever join: wind, trees, critters, and endless more. If the lesbian experience can be the well of loneliness, as Radclyffe Hall claims in her book published in 1928, for me the tropics seem to fill that well with rainwater, an abundant irrigation to surrounding leaves of grass.

And clearly, we have little doubt that I project in this essay. If I see lonely, then I feel lonely. Yet I can write that down easily enough now for nature’s peaceful environment shifts so well the disconnect in feeling. Was tricky to source this comfort in San Francisco’s urban space where enough rarely felt enough. And if my prose leans into self-absorption, accepting this truth happens parallel to treasuring the slow time that rural life affords so that this writing opens me up, and, I hope, connects with others. Another disclaimer admits that essay writing like this can be long on privilege, the sheer gift of ample time for exploring life. My unerring gratitude comes easy then and the writing effort continues as a work in progress, a happy one—some certainty, some mystery, all grateful.

Who knows? Maybe rural ease, the lulling warm trade wind can lift that curious kite into the air. At 56 years old I can still remember the comedy sitcom-ness in lesbian dating. Could be Hawai’i wind and sunshine help me to let go of the string some to fly that dating kite. Stay tuned, dear reader, for a few laughs, a few reader-writer bondings, a few zany essays. The recent San Francisco sojourn influences my facing future, then.

Perhaps at heart this essay explores privileges and permissions, a sort of kumbaya at the campground fire where community handholding can happen despite such radical difference. We need that now. Not one more consumer purchase, not one, will change what is ahead, the kuleana (responsibility) to act locally for the environment, which is our physical health.

Consider the time author Rebecca Solnit stands at a cocktail party and the man standing at her elbow explains a new book he read while she attempts to articulate a few insights, too. Yet he continues to explain and explain. Turns out she is the author of that book. Experiences like these motivate her book Men Explain Things to Me (2014) and fit the genre of behavior called mansplaining. Can we all check yo’ privilege? I try to observe my own.

Or how often do you hear women apologize for this, that, and everything. Sorry might become an assumed middle name on female baby birth certificates. In a way this essay exclaims “sorry” by lezplaining, over asking permission to be my lesbian self. Saying sorry all the time for existing and over people pleasing are learned habits that I now shift on the daily. Alison Bechdel’s comic strip, a 25-year success, titled Dykes to Watch Out For, implies that I need you to keep an eye on me. Am I an implied threat? The essay that you just finished reading attempts to suggest otherwise.