My Only Friend La Croix - Chapter 15

I resented but accepted the fact that I would probably never see My Only Friend La Croix again. Those conditions which I thought might be so easily replicated were not sufficient to summon my ghost; the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, and I could not Frankenstein together a moment based on patchwork circumstances. One can never stand at the same point in a flowing river.

Late in my time in San Francisco I met a woman at an event held at Dolores Park. I saw her from afar and determined to go talk to her group, making small talk before I left. I was enamored with her dark features and shaggy haircut and she radiated a youthful innocence and charm. I got her info from the host and asked her out on Instagram, where she agreed with minimal back-and-forth.

I met her at a wine bar. She wore a brown patchwork jacket and corduroy pants and green dangly earrings. We closed out the place then went to a tiki bar near the fog apartment, where we sat right up next to each other. “I really want to kiss you,” she said. Simple and effective.

On our second date we got into more serious topics rather than just eye-gazing. We talked about children, and she said that she wanted kids. I didn’t share that sentiment, partially because I lack maternal instinct, but also because I lacked paternal instinct. Perpetually I set myself up for failure; I wanted to keep seeing her despite knowing that we lacked long-term potential.

I went back to her apartment in the Lower Haight. All of her furniture seemed like she inherited it from her grandmother. Everything had old paisley patterns and it was made of dark wood. I considered it to be of good taste. She had a standing desk and a small shelf of books, mostly techy and self-help. No philosophy and little fiction. She had a wall of scattered art. There was a surreal portrait of a naked woman reclining, covered in ants. She claimed that her sister had made it. In her kitchen was an old wooden tray that she had painted with three small oranges. She made tea and we sat on her couch as she told me about her infatuation with moths. She told me about an experience she had backpacking, lying in a field, surrounded by hundreds of moths fluttering around her, and how transformational the whole experience had been.

Over the next few weeks, things went well, and we were going on dates and sharing long conversations. We spent a full day at the beach where we fooled around just a smidge on the sand and then again in the car before leaving. We went to a cocktail bar near her place and I felt euphoric as she held my arms as we walked back outside into the chill San Francisco air. Another evening, I brought my easel over and I sketched her in her underwear as she made a watercolor sketch of a moth within a lamp’s beam of light.

Eventually it came to feel that she was keeping me at arm’s reach. I would ride my bike up the hill and see her and then be on my way. We stopped going on dates and instead focused on the physical aspect of our relationship, mostly at her place, which I enjoyed immensely. I think she realized how it was going and so she said that she couldn’t offer me what it seemed that I wanted; I suggested that we continue seeing each other with no expectations on progress. We chose to lower the stakes and things continued without the assumption of growth.

We remained in this limbo for a few months. It was a pleasant limbo but I could tell that it was not to end the way that I wanted. I would see her, bike home, and contemplate the presence of My Only Friend La Croix. I continued in my routine, going to work, seeing her, then spending time with The Rat out on the balcony, chatting about his book.

I wondered where My Only Friend La Croix had gone but I attributed his absence as a fault of my neglect. It was impossible for me to pinpoint when I had lost him. My time in Casa Sanchez might have had the last true remnants of the spirit of My Only Friend La Croix floating in its walls. I tried and tried to bring him to the fog apartment, then into the Sky Palace, but I think La Croix prefers to be grounded in the lush earth. It’s strange how the second story apartment in Casa Sanchez actually felt like it was on the first floor; just a short walk down some steps of Saltillo tile kept me rooted to the earth below. Despite using the stairs thousands of times, I didn’t feel that my apartment was elevated. I was hunkered in—my place in the valley on Sanchez afforded me something cozy and warm.

Perhaps My Only Friend La Croix only in contrast with another: no shadow without something to stand in the light. None of the art that I made gave me the sensation that I truly craved, hearing whispers from the seltzer on my shoulder, charming me to imagine immense possibilities of what might transform on the canvas. I made the art but the art was doing nothing to make me.

I was living in the Sky Palace by the time that the situation with the moth-girl fizzled out entirely. I went to a party down the street, hosted by the same organizer who introduced us on our first encounter. I saw her there, chatted, and made a French exit. She sent me a message asking where I went—I told her that I was back at my place, and she suggested that she come over. I waited for a while and she must have changed her mind. A few days later, I told her that I was under the impression that she didn’t want to continue seeing each other intimately, which she confirmed.

I kept painting. I enjoyed the stop-motion picture of dried paint flecks shifting and migrating in a wetter body of paint as I flicked the palette knife over the entire mass, turning it twice per second over the smooth glass. I only slowed down on production once I realized that San Francisco had little more to offer me, and I didn’t want to move out of the state with wet canvases.

I carried cans of La Croix up steep 21st Street. I cooked and stared out at the moon to the east from the large window in my kitchen. I felt like a spider in a web of her own creation—I was in the tower of my own making, a product of long hours of labor and now I had nothing substantial to do—I felt nothing for establishing myself in this Sky Palace as I wandered around and watered my plants and wrote code and ate bread and jam heated on a cast iron while seated at my bistro table and I smelled my fragrances and gazed out at my parked 4Runner on the hill and took showers in my pink-tiled tub and contemplated my art collection and ground my coffee by hand and climbed up the three stories to take out the trash and poked quarters into the washing machine down in the cluttered garage. Sometimes I rode the J to the office which brought me no pleasure as we all sat at our own disparate desks and I would go to lunch by myself. On the weekends I zoned out over a shot of espresso at home or I would wander down the hill through Dolores Park on my way to Spro. The place had lost its charm for me as it no longer was a respite from the early morning fog and I lost the willpower to make it there before the rest of the world was stirring.

The whole space in the Sky was too large for me and I felt listless and the world was expansive and I could not find my footing to connect with it. I tried walking, the forever-cure: I compared Quane Street and Ames Alley on either side of Fair Oaks, just outside of my apartment. Quane felt like Southern California, full of succulents and palms and bright orange flowers. Ames had a large concrete wall with drooping plants and it had a sharp, mossy chill to it. It represented Northern California. I was surprised how different they could be just by virtue of their positioning on either side of the hill. I walked late at night down Quane and mingled with the cat that crossed my path. I was learning the place but it would never be home. I had written that off. The land was beautiful but the tower had no perch for My Only Friend La Croix, and that was enough for me to abandon it.

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