I’m visiting my friend R in San Francisco. R and I know each other from high school. We clicked quickly, partly due to the fact that we were in the extreme minority as high school students with migrant backgrounds, partly due to a shared love of indie rock. When we were 16 we secretly went out in Amsterdam, when we were 19 we studied at the UvA and shared an anti-squat apartment in Osdorp. When I went to art academy after two years instead of studying further, R went to Seoul on exchange. I wrote poetry at night, R dived into the wonderful world of corporate marketing.
R has lived in Dublin, Shanghai and Copenhagen since graduating, holding increasingly important roles for several major tech companies. Of course you end up in San Francisco, where she now lives with her husband E. She now drives a Jeep, buys sourdough bread from a hip bakery, does vinyasa yoga on weekends and is a member of a winery in Napa. She’s got an army subordinates and a company credit card. Sometimes my head spins at how different our lives have turned out.
On day two of my visit, we walk into City Lights, the publishing-bookstore founded in 1953 that howl van Allen Ginsberg and thus became a gathering place for creatives. We don’t do that on purpose: City Lights is on the edge of Chinatown, where R takes me to show me the dim sum restaurants and Cantonese bakeries, where when she misses her family, she can eat familiar dishes. When we are almost out of the neighborhood, we see the bookstore. City Lights is so cluttered with books that I have a minor panic attack before moving myself to the poetry department upstairs, where it’s quieter than downstairs. R knows nothing about Ginsberg, asks me confusedly what beat is and complains about a bloated stomach as I manically throw handfuls of poetry into my basket. A framed headline hangs proudly above one of the store’s shelves: BRAWL AT POET’S RECITAL THREE POLICEMEN BITTEN.
I would now like to say more interesting things about San Francisco. About the hilly neighbourhoods, how the city center is dominated by tech people and the homeless, about the many Black Lives Matter posters, the expats. And also about the neighborhoods of Castro, Mission and, of course, Haight-Ashbury – which the recently deceased Joan Didion wrote that brilliant essay in the hippie era – but because R feels increasingly strange, becomes dizzy, sleeps badly and despite her joy at my visit her pushing off plates of restaurant food because nothing tastes good, we decided this morning to go to Walgreens to buy a pregnancy test. And that just turned out to be positive. And the second too. And with R and her husband sitting next to each other in a daze, I quietly order some Amazon pregnancy books and wonder how the hell I’m going to finish this column that really needs to get to the editor ASAP.
“It feels like I’m in a K-hole,” says the father-to-be.
‘Can I no longer eat sushi?’ asks the mother-to-be. They are exemplary statements, but I cannot explain them either. I think of that headline, chaos wrapped in seven words.
“I’ll finish that column and then we’ll call the doctor,” I say. Thus.
Simone Atangana Bekono is a poet and writer. Her debut novel ‘Confrontations’ was awarded the Anton Wachter Prize this year.