But We Could Be Safer, Just for One Day

This time of year seems to make me even more nostalgic than normal. Last year, I wrote this post about living in Ottumwa during high school. Tonight I don't want to go back that far. I've been thinking about San Francisco more, really.

While I'd never want to get anywhere near thinking like a twenty year old again, there are still some parts of that life I miss. I know people will think I'm crazy, but I miss working in a cafe - even if the owner was an entitled asshole who had to leave Iran after the Shah was deposed and thought Americans (more specifically, American girls) were stupid. There are days I would love to go back there and wait on famous people who would tip like crazy and let me and my friends into their famous comedy clubs for free even though we were underage.

I would love, even for one evening, to have my old boyfriend (and this is only because my memory of the bad parts of our relationship is really fuzzy twenty years later) stop by and pick me up after work so we could go to our favorite Chinese restaurant to drink cocktails and eat potstickers and scallion pancakes with peanut butter sauce.

He could even walk me home to my hideously painted, Pepto Bismol pink living room and my two dorky roommates. The same weird and wonderful girls who would sit up with me for as long as I needed, to cry and bitch about said boyfriend.

Then, because it would be 1986, we could put on our brightly colored scarves, hippie skirts and leggings and wander around San Francisco taking photographs of Chinatown, North Beach and all the strip clubs along Broadway.

It would be great to have just one day like that - where no one needed anything from me and I didn't sit in a cubicle for eight hours and I wasn't the grown-up. Of course, it would mean trading in my daughters, which I couldn't imagine doing even for one day - and worst of all, I would still have to sport those frizzy bangs that make me cringe to look at twenty years later.