Towers

I'm sitting in the plane, back from Incheon, Korea (it was a one hour transit on the way back from San Francisco) and I'm thinking of her.

I miss her.

I don't miss her all day, every day. It depends on the environment. Right now the plane's quiet and sleepy and the blanket drawn up around me's comfortable, so I want her in a seat besides me. In San Francisco I didn't want her there - it didn't feel safe, especially when I was making my way back at night. (My friends say they'd heard gunshots one night out in SF, and got so bloody scared they drove back home to Mountain View and didn't return for a few weeks.)

American cities are strange. San Francisco is ugly and large, and while I got rather good at navigating the city, I never understood the way the poor, homeless people could coexist next to the yuppies walking down the street. I got out at the Civic Centre BART station, and stood there, mouth agape, at one of the most beautiful parks I'd ever seen in SF. I was about to take out a camera when a well-dressed old woman saw my open mouth and asked if I needed help — she gave me directions and then warned me to 'watch my wallet'.

On Saturday, after a meeting with another publishing startup in the city, I took a CalTrain down to Mountain View. Angad picked me up in a VW convertible.

Mountain View is beautiful. It's nearer to winter now, and so there are wild splashes of pink and reds in the underbrush. The streets are clean. The shops look sleepy and small, and Castro Street is chockful of quaint food shops (all healthy, in typical Californian fashion).

Angad took the roof down and we drove to Palo Alto, where Stanford is. The whole area leading out of SF is beautiful. It was then, driving in the cool ocean breeze, with the roof down and music blaring, did I wish that I could bring her down with me to see what I saw.

I'm sure London is as beautiful as California is. One day, we'd go together to explore the whole city. But we explore everything, anyway. It's only a matter of time.