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Feb 2016
I was heartbroken in San Francisco
But it wasn’t San Francisco’s fault
I had been abandoned
And I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say,
left for dead

Isn’t that how you always feel?
When someone you love abandons you?
Like they wouldn’t care if you died
It’s not their business to care anymore
That’s the beauty in leaving
And the travesty

So I walked up the winding hills
And I took in the beautiful Bay Area
And I stared out at Alcatraz
And I walked along the Golden Gate Bridge
And when I asked my best friend,
How many people do you think have jumped off this bridge?
She said, let’s go home

We took a ferry to Sausalito one day
Where it was just as beautiful
We ordered tacos and margaritas
I couldn’t eat the tacos
I couldn’t eat anything
I was on the heartbreak diet

I tried to mask it,
Lord knows I failed
But I tried

I went to every gay bar I could find
I covered my face in makeup trying to mask the misery
I blasted the happiest song I could think of,
Which was Love Shack, by the B52s
I met a preschool teacher,
She offered me ******* in the bathroom of some bar
I don’t do drugs, but sometimes
You have nothing to lose

When I leave California, I told myself,
I will leave heartbreak behind
I will leave my heart in San Francisco, if you will
But that didn’t work out too well

Because when I got home, it was everywhere
It was in the walls, it was the smell of my own sheets
It was his leftover cigarette butts on my balcony
It was the flannels he bought me
Because I was always shivering at night
And his lighters in my coat pocket
Even the slight slant of my apartment’s floor
That he would always complain about
It wasn’t San Francisco, it was anywhere
Vacation is not always a vacation.
Laura Gee
Written by
Laura Gee  Jersey City
(Jersey City)   
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