It is a weird city, I assure you. The always slightly wrong perception of its warmness, sunniness, dreamfulness; the always slightly false promise of success. The extremely polarized people: people with glamorous career paths and people with none of that. And all of them fully disoriented. You must have to live disorientedly to fit in.

To top it all off, as we are speaking I have a bathroom floor full of dead ants and they’ve been there for days. And I’ve been reluctant to clean them up. Sure, that’s more of a weirdness about me, but I am part of the city, aren’t I? I can’t deny it even if I wanted to. After living here for two years, part of the city’s character starts living and growing in me. The same goes when you love something—you let part of them invade, grow and live in you.

So the ants. They were of course live ants to start with. I used baits to trap them and kill them and now they are all dead on my floor. I consider one problem solved, leaving behind the debris of solution, corpse of success that we first gloat over and then seek further solutions as it becomes in itself another problem. Although the second problem seems easier, being lifeless and immobile, it is much larger. The volume of dead ants are ten times more than what I saw live. The baits must have attracted what had been outside of my apartment, not part of my initial problem. Anyhow, I killed them all for that some of them were in the way of my shallow but genuine conception of happiness.

With that San Francisco is a place that harbors a series of seemingly solvable but actually endless problems.

It is a place after staying for a while you just have to leave, leaving behind the energy, inventiveness, the vain excitement which entirely contribute to your stress, confusion and greed. Leave to be able to breathe again.

But can you really escape? This land of itching greed is endless, formless, and worst of all, is all you have, if you consider yourself a dreamful person. You come here with high expectation, and although you have learned to lower it to protect yourself from disappointment, you are still internally purely hopeful. You can be obsessed with the hope that lives and grows in you. You can be obsessed with anything if it’s all you have. Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to fall in obsession.

To me the obsession is this: to live here you have to have a dream, have to have a story, have to make things happen or at least make things move. Like living in tranquility is as good as dead. So there exist countless transient turbulences, some of which solely created by me. Until no one cares. No one cares.

But at least I have one power.

“Take your broken heart. Turn it into art.”

I try.