I was alone on a Sunday morning. My clothes hunched around my body as if made of lead, seeming to absorb the dampness of my spirits. A chilly fog had just blown in from the bay in that five o’clock hour, stirring the dawn with a creamy white hue, as if the Holy Spirit himself decided to grace this sullen Sabbath day. The park benches were fallen soldiers; bent in defeat and browned with weather and war. Peace found them in these early hours, well deserved solace from the bustle of daily family picnics; boys smashing their wheeled toys over the stalwart arches; stinking old men, heavy with experience, discontentment, and newspapers; and squirming teenage lovers. Although, never are these veterans safe from the dwellings of gloomy dreamers, plagued with insomnia and a pressing urgency to find the object that sits invisible in the back of their heads. Always searching, aimless, but perseverant, because without perseverance there develops a hole where all the hope that was once had falls out, destined to be refilled with devices of this world detrimental to the body and soul until one realizes that even those material things cannot suffice and only two choices remain: end this pain of ignorance or keep searching. And so the soldiers doubled over, kneeling, holding themselves together for a few more moments, are never alone, not even as the morning dew gathers itself on the green blades of grass at the turning of the tide from the Pacific coast. I roll in with the fog and take a seat on a bench. I place my head into my hands, lean forward, and think.

My black mood lures me back to the past again. A cartoon strip of a jumping, smiling kid budding with childhood innocence morphs into a primitive sloth-like creature, unsatisfied with all of her books and jewelry and friends. It reels through my mind again. This is how I am. Since I was born, I’ve been digging for Fool’s Gold, dabbling in the arts of sinful pleasure. At age three, I’d learned how to steal my mother’s freshly baked lemon squares gradually, so that she wouldn’t notice when one then another was taken. I would sit in my closet and cover myself up in a blanket, then shove my tiny fingers into its yellow flesh and break off little pieces to put in my mouth. I was spoiled back then, a rotting corpse even at my own birth, so I should have quit while I was ahead. But instead I chose to stick a knife into my heart, again and again, brutalized at age nine, twelve, seventeen, and again now, and all the time in between, making myself deader and deader. My shredded skin tells the story of a person putrid with experience, of irreconcilable shame; shame that I cannot come to terms with, that I must shed like a snake, but instead I choose to devour, coaxed by some compulsion toward wickedness, and cursed by my own native blight. A paradigm of what it means to submit to ones own desires, I slink across the streets of San Francisco, hoping to lose myself in the sin of the city, but the yellow gas that trails behind me is trapped by the ghostly fog. I am who I am in this place. I suppose in all places.