falling in and out of love.

“You can’t compare your past relationships – they are in entirely different contexts, you are very different now.”

- Damara, graduate student, age 27

“In past relationships, when you say goodbye to the bad memories, you also have to say goodbye to the good.”

- Shanasue’s mom, RN, age 56

“You’ve learned from it. You take what you get and you move on. Now you know what to do in your next relationship.”

- Deb, graduate student, age 27

I fell in love with San Francisco when I realized that there was an incredible, supported, and experimental space for possibility and potential. When I was in love, I moved freely, the BART, muni, and my red Univega carried me to the many different spaces that held my imaginative and metaphysical desires, as well as my commitment to civic obligation and cultural agency. My access to diverse populations, cultural institutions, public spaces, and community organizations was as broad and expansive as the possibilities of my ideas. I could hang out with the girls in the projects of Sunnydale, encourage the boys at the Juvie in Twin Peaks, discuss my video art with my neighbor in the Excelsior, and listen to old records and intimate stories at a CJM exhibit.

Not only did the city foster my personal and social interest, political concerns, and professional goals, it helped me see them in practice, strengthening and defining the foundation of my values. For the first time (in a domestic city), community-based initiatives, anti-capitalism, environmental sustainability and social justice had more meaning and relevance than ever before. For the first time words with hypens became active, engaging and effective. I was deeply in love.

But like all my past relationships – both with people and places, I changed; discovered limitations, and fell out of love. The peninsula to me had both geographic and psychological limitations. I fell out of love with San Francisco when I realized that the spaces that I moved so freely in and with, that I admired and gleaned from, were very much contained. Not the ‘contained’ that implies restraint and boundaries, but the ‘contained’ that defines ownership, having, holding, and compartmentalizing. The city’s characteristics, methodologies and social responsibilities could be translated and transformative – elsewhere and anywhere.

My definition of potentiality and possibility in their previous context began to undergo tremendous change. When I moved to the southwest, I saw, felt, and tasted the unexpected remaking, interpretation, and metamorphosis of the issues, assets, resources, practices, and systems I had only experienced and explored in San Francisco. Collaboration, diversity, social change, and sustainability had a completely different history and rhetoric here in the desert. So while applying my inherent values, I ceased all comparisons, ended my relationship with San Francisco, and *joyously discovered – OF COURSE I COULD FALL IN LOVE AGAIN!

Furthermore, taking the roots of my foundation and replanting them somewhere else – anywhere else was more empowering, challenging, and progressive than I could ever imagined. Very similar to when I was in love with the city, when possibilities and potentialities were always in motion, when transportation supported physical momentum, I too, could move and redefine and reinterpret the current city I inhabit -Tucson. And thus be very much prepared to fall in love again.