At the Intersection of Fillmore and Sutter...

The sidewalks, steep with San Franciscian-like incline, traversed the hills of the Fillmore district like a serpent's belly molded to an uneven terrain. Tall trees line the street within the confides of their two-by-two caged sections of Californian earth; they wave to us from above, pushed by the crisp midnight air gusting from the bay. A dispossessed cat cowers next to a newspaper rack; a slip of white paper dances across an empty intersection; a storekeeper smiles at us through the window glass of her gallery as she reverses the open sign to "closed;"and, save for the motions of our feet upon such sacred ground, all is still is the city's streetlamp-lit night.

The bell of the dinner's front door startles the two only men inside as they lean against the sparkly blue counters and listed to the highlights from the day's Giant's game on a small tube radio, cigarettes hang motionless in between their fingers as they envision the radio announcer's words of strikes, no hitters, and failed attempts by visiting team; a doo-wop band croons "...since I don't have you" from a jukebox in the corner. The tall one stands upright, brushes his hands down his apron, and repositions his white paper cap on his head.

"Kitchen's closed up, I'm afraid." He says, no doubt tired from a lengthy shift full of rude hipsters and cheap-tip artists from the surrounding lofts.

In efforts to extend the night and time together, we press warily for desert only, no cooking required. He eyes us as he shifts his white bowtie. He concedes and whips up the fastest brown cow and strawberry milk shake I had ever seen. We thank him, tip him, and thank him once again for the nights final service. 

Outside, we push our collars up and continue down the sidewalk. With straws to lips we both pause; and without uttering a word, we both instantly take note of a tavern across the street. A single overhead light shines upon a remaining worker standing in front of a deep sink. His shirtsleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and his arms, brown and muscular, work feverishly to scrub the final sauce pans and utensils from the night's closing hours. Among chairs upside-down on tables and stools lifted upon the aged wooden bar and amid the grease-laden steamy pub air filled with the stench of sour beer and dried piss, the man whistles and Ecuadorian children's song and closes his eyes at the chorus to better picture the reasons why he works so very hard. I weave her long, beautiful fingers into mine and squeeze them gently as we take is such surrealism.

We toss our empty cups into a rubbish bin, and upon secure one another's hands again, I press my lips to her forehead and kiss it softly as three people approach from behind and pass us along the sidewalk. The last of the trio, a young man with a cell phone to his ear, informs the person at the other end that everything was "just going wrong" and that his "grandma up and died" that morning. They round a corner and disappear to handle an apparent issue involving an exgirlfriend trying to gain access to his "place."Returning to her, I close my eyes and lean in close to smell the seemingly endless distance between the tip of her right shoulder and the bottom of her earlobe. We pretend to dance on a driveway of an old Victorian on Sutter; we talk of living in such a grand manor; we dodge a large cockroach darting across the concrete toward a storm drain; we laugh and change our minds about the hundred year old home.

She is a pillar of light in the darkened streets of Japantown;
She is a glimmering scepter stabbed into middle of foggy night's floor;
She is immeasurable, a deity amid the jagged, a reincarnate, no less, from the writings of the wine-gut-bohemian-Beat-gods that used to walk these very same walkways and describe sweet, bright-eyed women of the very same caliber.

Ours are San Francisco's nights with her rolling hills so unforgiving upon we lost souls lost only within one another. Sigh.