What I really want is to be kissed, but instead San Francisco slings an arm around my shoulder because we are old friends, and it’s understood that nothing is ever going to happen.

P. hands me one of the two pairs of gloves he brought and his extra helmet. “I’m not ticklish in this jacket,” he says, so I wrap my arms around his waist and he threads through traffic to one of the causeways we will take tonight - this first to man-made Treasure Island next to Yerba Buena Island (that was Goat Island once, a name I like better) where the imported soil is contaminated and the housing prices consistently high. We roll our eyes at the little marina with the boats of richer people across from perhaps the only non-artisanal mobile food vendor in the city.

There is a bridge that vogues behind us, the cartilage monument reflecting how those architects saw our crosshatched future. Through the Presidio where earthquake cottages once stood to conversations with the enormous swans around the Palace of Fine Arts, then a straight shot down Divisadero for crudo in a quiet, white space while he lists all the women who do not love him, and through wind to the airport. I blow a kiss and wake up in New York.