San Francisco

And so they come, by buses trains ferries planes. Workers, tourists, students. We join a crowd of babbling people moving en masse along Market Street. Eyes fixed straight ahead, ignoring the homeless, we spread out like ants through long streets and relentless hills.

The comforting aroma of eggs, bacon, coffee, and pastries, drifts past street corners before surrendering and dissipating to the heady exhaust fumes of agitated tourist buses. Cable cars switch click and clatter over rails and hills and down to the bay. And over there across still sleeping roofs of reluctant commuters, rising majestically above a heavy morning mist, the Golden Gate Bridge. Tall, brooding, a bridge of sighs, of expectations. Beads of moisture cling to orange-red beams and cables, that flex and buckle under tumbling clouds of gloom. A shock of humanity is moving in thoughtless streams across the trembling bridge, and it cradles them all safely, as the voracious city accepts them all gladly.

And you can leave your heart here, some do…we too left something.