Since the end of Covid, public transit ridership in the San Francisco Bay Area has been going steadily up. I moved to San Francisco in late 2021, near the nadir of subway ridership, and even during rush hour it was like a ghost town. In the two years I was gone, I came back every four or five months. Every time, I noticed that the subway — called Bay Area Metropolitan Transit, BART for short — felt a little bit more crowded, a little bit more city-ish.
Now I've just moved back. I got a job I’m excited about. I can’t find seats on BART during rush hour.
The statistics back this up. Since April 2021, BART ridership has risen pretty much every month compared to the same month from the previous year (ridership ebbs and flows throughout each year). This is much easier to see visually:
But many people in the Bay Area aren’t noticing.
It makes sense. To them, transit took a nosedive during Covid and never got better. Despite the fact that it has been steadily rising, it is still at less than half of pre-pandemic levels. The day-to-day changes in ridership are imperceptible, only tangible if you're gone for a while. To look at the graph here: I may be right, but so are they.
Such is it with personal change.
My day-to-day experience in Queens was steady, steadier than it had been since I was 18. Queens was friends and family, work, running, food, train to DC or Boston every three weeks. I was a regular at a couple pizza places, a dive bar, a coffee shop, and even an incredible grocery store with nine types of feta cheese. The only thing that noticeably changed was the weather; and the only thing that I was unhappy with was the weather. I was content, and I assumed that change and growth was something that, for two years, had passed me by.
I thought I would return to California someday. But I didn't know. You can try to structure your life, but it wends and jars in unexpected ways. Yet when I returned, I thought — everything will be as it was. But it wasn’t, exactly, and I wasn’t either.
In some ways, of course, things are the same. Most of my friends are still here, and it’s been lovely to see them again. One of my former roommates (and a blog reader — hi!) had saved the old art from our kitchen, and gave it to me along with our plates and a few rolled-up prints that I'd found in a thrift store years ago. My favourite grocery store brownies still have the same recipe. The buildings are the same; the sea lions still nap in the sun. And I, too, still love the sun and parks and stats and charts.
But there are obvious things that have changed in my daily routine since then: I run, now, and I can hardly imagine my life without it; I watch tennis, after sneaking into the courtside seats at 1 AM at the US Open in Flushing. The 7 train, for two years, was mine, and I still think sometimes that I will wake up back in my old apartment, the first place I had truly made my own, a place that will always be one of my homes.
As with BART ridership, in the two weeks since I've returned I’ve been surprised at how the incremental changes in myself have added up over the last two years. I am more sure of my vision of the world. I hope and think I am still open to ideas and changing my mind. But with age, one becomes a bit more sure of the worlds that they want to see.
When I moved to San Francisco at 26, I was a wide-eyed and open-minded romantic. I had been hardened and saddened by the world but oh! Here I was; I was in California and everything was beautiful. I learned about all the Bay's ways of being and new religions and wrote articles in whatever direction the sources took me. I wasn’t innocent or naive, exactly, but I had come from Zambia, and then India, and pandemic-era Chicago, and so I had been exposed to all these ideas and ways of thinking and different perspectives like water rushing over me, able to take it all in without needing to clearly articulate my own perspective or judgments.
Now I know that the world I want to see looks a lot like Queens. People are from everywhere, with different cares and careers and conversation styles, different ways of being. I learned so much from becoming friends with my neighbors and run club and everyone I happened to meet, and I loved my life. I liked people for who they were; they liked me for who I was.
Because of this, I am more critical of certain Bay Area social scenes than I was two years ago. I notice some people only want to be in community with other intellectuals who have big ideas about changing the world, as if one cannot learn just as much — if not more — from being in community with people unlike oneself. If one wants to stay in such a community secluded from the outside world, then so be it. But to influence the outside world well? I think you need to be in it, to care about it, to love it.
I am more wary when intelligence is the thing someone most values about me, since I know now that intelligence is not the thing I value most in myself.
In the film Past Lives, Nora, a married woman in her 30s who moved from Korea to North America as a child, meets up with her childhood friend and past love Hae Sung. It is a film about reconciling the lives that might have been with the lives that are, and falls, although not without complication, on the side of living the life that is. It’s about lost love, yes, but also holding within you many places and lives. Maybe in another universe...
I could have continued everything I loved about my life in Queens. I could still, maybe. In the past five months of unemployment, I sometimes felt more like a ghost than a human, neither here nor there, not quite in any life.
I saw myself in Queens, waking up fifty years later on my same street, with my same community. I saw myself in the UK, where I was born, back to the scrappy, adrift energy of my early twenties, the wide-eyed world of work and ideas and idealism. And I saw myself back in California in a train coming out of the water in West Oakland, mesmerized by the port containers and the fog on the hills.
And oh, I think that is why even when you make the choice to live the life that is, it still hurts to be human; there is always a melancholy even to coming home.
This was a beautiful, touching read and I admire the clarity you have in articulating difficult personal insights, all the more admirable for managing to be clear without falling into pat resolutions or conclusions. I love the details like nine different kinds of feta cheese, and then the artful chiasmus about the weather - I could go on, but I came here to comment on two deeper notes: first, I love that you say you value more about yourself than your intelligence (though, valuing my contrarian nature as I do, I'd push back and ask you to widen your view of what intelligence means - even as I imagine you responding with, 'well that's not the meaning that those who praise my intelligence have in mind when they note it,' fair) and second, I love that you point to how there is melancholy in coming home, as well as how beautiful the life you cultivated in Queens is.
Years ago a friend of mine from high school said that everybody has nostalgia for paradise / everyone is an exile if you take Genesis seriously. Every few months I think about how she just shared that casually over lunch or on a drive or something. There just is a human condition of longing for home that is beyond home; 'nostalgia' was a term coined by a psychiatrist in the 19th century originally for diagnostic purposes, and he used two Greek words: nostos, for home, and the -algia ending that means pain. Nowadays with so many of us growing up one place, going to school another, and then working in yet other places, all separated often by hundreds of miles and fantastic geological features that make it difficult to visit across the many places that shape us, it's more concrete that 'home' is never all in one place at one time. Just lovely to read because in it all there's that hope for the life that is, and there's that fondness for places like Queens. What you described with your community there reminds me also of what I love about Jersey City, too, and the church I've found here, how it's inevitable to meet people who fall under all kinds of umbrellas of different ages, politics, hobbies, passions, stories. Wishing that for more people!
Sorry for rambling, your post clearly was inspiring and I hope you soon reflect on how you've cultivated yet another wonderful sense of place and community in the new-old place you find yourself!
Cheers :o)
Hope you had a smooth move and have an amazing time back in the bay! I love the parallel you made between the incremental changes in yourself and that of BART ridership - and all it takes is to notice. Stay in touch 💫