SAN FRANCISCO FOG

I’d just gotten off the BART, and San Francisco was windy. I didn’t have a jacket with me, and I’d been wearing a skirt which blew up a little bit when I left the station, and a group of men sitting out there on the pavement catcalled me. None of those things bothered me very much, though. The only thing that mattered to me, to be honest, was the fact that no matter what happened to me, I’d rather not have existed.

I don’t mean that I’d rather have been dead. Even if I died I couldn’t do anything about the fact that I’d existed at some point. It was the only thing I really cared about at the time: the thought that nobody could ask you whether or not you wanted to exist until you already did. I used to imagine that idea as a fog, slowly covering my mind, steadily eating me up completely. It’s taken me over, now—gray smoke drifting around my cranial cavity, leisurely driving me insane.

I was in San Francisco that day to see my cello teacher. I always felt so cool, walking around a city with a cello on my back. It made me feel the kind of person that people would see and wonder about. But that wouldn’t be happening very often anymore, if ever. I was seeing my cello teacher in order to receive my last lesson, give her my last cash payment, and then quietly duck out of her life. Seven years of lessons had finally come to an end.

I was leaving—going to college. And no, I didn’t have to quit cello, but I was going to. It’s funny, sometimes, to think of all the random little things you, for whatever reason, felt you had to kill about yourself on your way to adulthood. I didn’t even necessarily want to quit cello. But I did. I don’t really even remember how I came to that conclusion; I guess it was just the way things were.

I also don’t remember much about that last lesson. I remember my teacher Google searching the admission process into Berkeley’s symphony orchestra, and we both kind of pretended that I might join, even though I knew in my heart, and she could tell by the look in my eyes, that it wasn’t going to be happening. And we were right; it didn’t. I also remember that she hugged me when I left, and there was this feeling in the air for a second that there was a lot being left unsaid. I don’t really know what it was. It meant a lot to me that she hugged me, though.

There’s something I really can’t stand about leaving something behind without properly acknowledging it. I’ve never been a big fan of parties or huge celebrations, but I can see the dignity of it. It’s really nice to think that people take the time to care about things like getting a year older, or getting a new job, or moving to a new house—and they just all sort of gather in a group and think about it together for a little bit. Even if they’re doing other things—like playing games, or drinking, or gossiping about people who aren’t there—everyone in that room really has just gathered as a way to acknowledge the importance of something. It’s one of the only little antidotes to existence that I really can say actually helps.

After my lesson, I stopped at this little corner store on my way back to the BART station, and bought a raspberry Snapple. It’s not like I was even thirsty or anything, but there’s something weirdly sacred to me about buying drinks. It gives all of the satisfaction of having spent money, with none of that weird buyers-guilt. It’s cheap, and you don’t have to commit to some object you might not want later; you can just piss it out.

As I got onto the subway car, some guy had his feet up on the only empty seat, and I gave him this really mean, annoyed look to make him put them down. He did, and we sat side-by-side for 30 minutes, neither of us speaking, both of us being pushed 40 miles an hour in the same direction, feeling, I think, a sense of mutual contempt, with a side of strange respect. He got off at South San Francisco, and I stayed on till San Bruno.

I really love San Bruno’s BART station because it’s right next to a Target. I decided as I was getting into my car that I should stop in there to buy new pencils for college. Not that I didn’t already have pencils—I actually had too many—but these ones would be special. They’d be my “college pencils,” and therefore, superior to the identical looking “high-school pencils” that had slaved away over AP Chemistry and German 5. These pencils would write notes about serious English literature, and Freudian ideas about sexual deviancy. My old pencils just weren’t up to the task.

When I finally did get home, I went straight to my room, hopelessly wishing to avoid my family. My parents were getting a divorce at the time, so whenever I was home they were aggressively passive aggressive to each other, and aggressively kind to me. Neither of them particularly loved me, I don’t think. I do believe that they both wanted to, though. My mother definitely loved me more than my father did, I can tell you that. But even she seemed to love the idea of my dependency on her more than she ever loved me as a person. It’s different. I don’t think very many people feel comfortable pointing that out, because I assume quite a lot of people live their lives voluntarily trapped in the gentle delusion that they’re the same. But they’re not, and I know that they aren’t, and I can’t really do anything about it. I think one of the worst conditions of life for me so far has been that, no matter how badly I wish you could, you can’t expect people to love you in the exact way you want them to.

I ate dinner with my parents quietly, as both of them periodically asked me about my day, carefully avoiding any follow-up questions that might accidentally reveal their daughter as a human being made of pounds of real flesh, and not just some pretty, delicate little straw-man. They said they were sad that I would be leaving them so soon, and that it made them feel old that I was so grown up. “That’s nice,” I remember thinking, without feeling any real significance attached to their words or my reaction to them. We were all empty that evening, wishing we could better pretend that we’d had something we would miss.

When I went to bed that night I kept thinking: this is the last night you’ll ever sleep here as a child. I kept repeating in my head, “feel it; acknowledge it; feel it; acknowledge it” in the hope that if I thought hard enough, I could solidify the moment in my mind, crystallize it, and hold it in my hand. Maybe I’d be able to put it on my bookshelf and look at it from time to time, without any sense of guilt that the moment had left me. It’d be right there forever, eternally within my reach.

I wasn’t able to do that, of course, which wasn’t something I could quite grapple with until I was waking up the next morning, realizing that, despite my best efforts, sleep had overtaken me. My last day of my childhood, my last day living at home, my last day of having other people to blame my sense of worthlessness on, gone without so much as a foggy trace of memory. In its place, the paralyzing assurance that, no matter what I did, I’d have to keep moving on. The horrifying thought I’d been trying all day to avoid—that existence means leaving things a million different times, with no way to ever know whether you’ve properly said goodbye.

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Lucille Lorenz

Lucille Lorenz is currently a sophomore at UC Berkeley, where she studies comparative literature. She is currently on the editorial board of The Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal, and is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Vagabond Multilingual Journal. She has previously published an essay in After the Art, but this is her first time publishing creative writing. She is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.