Bluesky Holiday

Sunny, warm, 72 degrees. Yesterday was the most pleasant to-date this year in San Francisco. The summer crowd that is overdue returns to Ocean Beach, which comes back to life after a prolonged, dreadful winter of rain. It was a scene of a bluesky holiday: the chirping of birds, screaming of kids with muddied feet, wandering of roller-bladers in skimpy muscle shirts, sauntering of clueless-looking tourists. After a sweaty morning workout, my partner in crime Tony and I headed down to the coast to have lunch at the New Bistro at the Cliff House. We ordered a Louis crab salad and broiled mahi-mahi sandwich with mixed greens. The conversation nudges to the direction of my heart condition after the unfulfilled love drama. I complacently tell him that I've got over it. The issue is not about negotiating the difference between two people but letting go. Changing someone or making him assimilate to what I look for in a partner is the last thing I want in a relationship. Assimilation destroys that part of a person that strives for self-expression and constitutes true self. If the solitary, hermit lifestyle that he relishes so much and makes him happy, it would be utterly selfish of me to make him change for me. Tony ponderously, with a tinge of pride of his friend, looks at me while his finger gently brushes his moustache. We look out the floor window to a blue sea of glittering diamonds and trace the seemingly unreachable horizon where the sky meets the ocean. I tell him how blue the sky is and how beautiful the weather is. With the sense of pride and gratitude like that in a survivor of some unforeseen disaster, I tell Tony that I need a bluesky holiday, like the sunshine and blue sky we finally enjoy after the storm has passed away, from relationship and drama.