San Francisco, 17

It is Saturday in San Francisco: the air cool and distantly salty—the remains of humans past and those to come. We are sitting in the Conservatory lobby, and we are on our phones. We prefer Instagram over Facebook. We like proper grammar and use fewer acronyms than adults believe. I mean, it makes sense. Some of us are poets and all of us are creators of a new future—taking pen to fingertip, shouting to be heard. We step out of the Conservatory. There is shit on the ground and we do not know what to make of it, so we walk past it with our noses pinched and hope our futures will lead us somewhere less lonely than the sidewalk it sits on, left kindly by some stranger. We also trace syringes in the parking lot—so many—the remnants of someone’s short-lived, saccharine dream locked in a vein. There is so much darkness under the blue sky. We continue to walk. We are listening to good music, artists like The Neighbourhood and 21 Savage and the London Symphony Orchestra and Coltrane in a single playlist. Which is to say that our generation knows no boundaries: we exist in the confinements of freedom: everything is free if you will it. We keep walking. We are at the pier. Contrary to popular belief, we do like nature. We enjoy tasting the salty air, admiring the murky, licorice-looking kelp dancing under the water, the sea lions sitting on their wooden planks. Actually, we are scared we will lose nature and this world before we get to know it well enough. We would like to ask the men in Rolex watches and business suits to make it stop, and we have. We are young, which means they will not listen to us. What adults do not know is that our trauma has outlived us: we attend school fearing the bullet, get chased back home by slurs. We know this place is not very friendly. But we would like to be friendly back nonetheless. We know so much more than we would like. Yes, it hurts. Here and here and here and here. But we have no one to kiss our hurts away for us, so we do it ourselves. We have learned how. And we will never forget.