Notes on Postcard Writing.

Dear ___________,
    We've moved to San Francisco where I've vowed to reconnect with my pen. The sea lions have vanished, the sun won't stop shining and the cable cars are always full up - like our bellies on lentil soup.
    They said coming this way, immersing ourselves in the crux of technology, would better prepare us for future lives in the 21st century. But here we are strangers mistaken for __________. Here we count change before store clerks as others pay with food stamps. We find respite in knowing that we are better, will be better because we are young, white and educated. Inside we resent and envy the ease with which they (you know which they I mean of course) handle the hardship. Here, they keep sunflower heads floating near the door of the super market and I pocket one each time I exit because I find the smell of decay comforting.
    Our apartment is quaint and lovely however, as we have filled it with past treasures accrued during blissful coed years at private institutions. Second hand chairs sit well with me.
I've taken to altar building (but this you know) and push myself to hear, to see beyond this constant stimulus. I wonder if people are really happy here or, if they are merely adept at maintaining facades at least until personal quakes shatter them.
    On a happier note, faraway lover has planned a visit though I can't imagine crossing state lines to see myself. The parting was so cinematic (me driving away distraught as he stood in the street sobbing until he melted into the rearview, evaporated or something more poetic) that I had longed for a Super 8 to capture him, us, us and the time where the reel needn't be switched and the tracking of my melancholy would never be off. When he arrives, we will eat mussels on a park bench before repeating the scene in the Oakland airport (but this time in opposite roles). For this I am not excited.
    But the fog will hide the impending despair and I will be thankful for the din of the city. Maybe the seals will come back coated in food stamps and we will smile.