I have been both a ghost and haunted in the city I love.
Rebecca Solnit
The fog comes in off the Pacific like it owns the place. Because it does. And somewhere in Sea Cliff, where the money lives quiet and the views cost more than most people make in a lifetime, there are ballet dancers on a balcony.
LINES Ballet. Alonzo King. Bodies that have been broken down and rebuilt, over and over, until they can do things that seem to violate the basic laws of physics. And they’re performing on a balcony. Not a stage. Not a theater. A fucking balcony with the Golden Gate Bridge doing its iconic thing in the background.
This is the kind of San Francisco moment that makes you understand why people lose their minds over this city. The collision of high art and high real estate, human grace against industrial grandeur, fog rolling through it all like nature’s own special effect.
These dancers have sacrificed everything, their joints, their social lives, probably their sanity, to move like this. And here they are, suspended between sky and sea, the bridge watching like some massive steel witness to the ephemeral.
Ghost and haunted, Solnit wrote about San Francisco. Yeah. These bodies, this moment, this city, all of it passing through, all of it already memory.