One night during junior year of high school, my classmates Sam, Jessica, and I drive to Coronado, where we eat dinner, share ice cream, and walk the beach at night like the best of them. We weren’t particularly close, in fact we hung out only a few more times that year and never again. But memory tends to surprise us with its cherry-picked moments, of car rides and insults and faces and smells that stay fresh, that outlive the rest.

*

We walk through the Hotel del Coronado toward the beach, tracing the walls with our fingertips as if to mark a trail. We slow our steps to study the framed photos of Marilyn Monroe posing in front of the very same hotel; Some Like It Hot was filmed here, which I saw shortly after with the very same Jessica. Jessica was the first person I met who went out of her way to say ‘films’ rather than ‘movies,’ a self-conscious habit that had its intended impact as I was easily impressed.

*

We push open the exit doors and light from the hallway rushes ahead then retreats. By the time the doors click shut our shoes are off and we’re running through dark toward water. I remember shouting to be heard, so there must have been wind. Jessica was a senior, so hardly older though at the time I considered it to be much older, so when she suggests that each of us share our favorite word, Sam and I go along as if obeying an older sibling. At the water’s edge we come up with yes, summer, and serendipity.

*

"Serendipity" and "there must be a God" and "it’s a sign" slip out of my mouth interchangeably, a way to acknowledge those moments that feel perfectly planned and executed, like someone had me in mind. Even the most trivial instance of serendipity inspires a thrill because it suggests the possibility that things might not be so hopelessly random after all.

*

I’m away from the city for weeks and within a few hours of my return, I’m on a walk through Golden Gate Park. I pass de Young and see the doors propped open, so I slip in and discover it’s the one free day of the month, 15 minutes before closing. Only a few of us remain and we wander noiselessly, hushed by the grandeur of art with no spectators. For the first time — how did I miss it before? — I spend time with Pierre-Edouard Baranowski by Amedeo Modigliani, a portrait of a boy with blue-green eyes. It was painted in 1918, just like his Portrait of a Young Woman, which I had recently seen at the New Orleans Museum of Art. A century later and here I am meeting them for the first time. I think, it’s a sign. Then I remember yes, summer, and serendipity.

*

The potential benefit of analyzing Bookswept’s lacuna would be to arrive at a conclusion that prevents it from happening again. Beyond that, such self-examination risks wasting even more time, when all there is simply left to do is do. I greet this space with just enough shame to inspire determination lest another four seasons pass with few words as evidence.

*

At the moment I work at a book club of sorts, its finest feature a library with over 10,000 books about books, books on California, and fine press books printed in California. They are cataloged and arranged in a way that evidently made sense to the only librarian the books have ever known, who died just six months before I began my employment. Two slim volumes have held my attention the longest: John Steinbeck’s How Edith McGillcuddy Met R.L.S (1943) and Joan Didion’s Telling Stories (1978). Describing the early years of her writing career when she wrote photo captions for Vogue (“the monthly grand illusion”), Didion writes, “I learned a kind of ease with words . . . a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page.”

*

I take the train into San Francisco and for the first time I experience the city as a purely practical destination, the streets as a means to get to an office. The city used to feel inaccessible, always suggesting that it was too busy to get to know me, but I think we’ve grown accustomed to each other.

*

The sidewalks are now full of familiar faces, like the valet in the top hat outside of the Marriott, the girl wearing a red bow tie who turns right on Harrison Street, and the impossibly friendly Jehovah’s Witnesses with tight grips on their pamphlets. I once caught a man on pamphlet duty lean over to whisper something into his comrade’s ear, who in response leaned his whole body back in laughter, louder than anyone should be laughing at 7 a.m. in the cold. I can only assume that those pamphlets indeed hold all that is good and holy, as promised.

*

Buildings replace trees and pieces of trash replace leaves, and on one morning the wind was so strong that trash swirled up into the air, and for half a second a few scraps circled right above my head like a crown.

*

I’m currently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, in which I’m reminded “nothing is ever what they say, and no one holy one hundred percent.”