RO ON SPACE ON THE NOSE - 3

COFFEE & BAGELS

It's Friday morning. I sit in a corner office on the 14th Floor of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, working on Microsoft. I bite into an Onion Bagel, bluntly cut with a plastic knife and schmeared with spring onion cream cheese. As the aroma of coffee wafts from the kitchen across the corridor, emotions wash me in different flavors; most of them are chicory-bitter, and a very few, sweet. I’m immediately transported to a Friday morning some ten odd years ago.

The cluster of downtown San Fran’s grey-brown buildings, kafkaesque, darkens my moving vision. The grating wheels of the cable car make auditory furrows upon the nerves of my teeth. A cold lonely wind wraps me in its arms and clings to me; when I embrace it back, it slaps me on the face.

In these few seconds, I am acutely aware of how outcast I was all those years, the embers of my spirit stubbed out by that apparently refined, non-smoking society. I think of what I left behind – a civilized prison that went to great lengths to pretend not to be one, in a culture outwardly refined and accepting and respectful of difference, but hiding its hypocritical ugly face under a beautiful, smiling, subtle mask of discrimination.

I thought I’d forgotten it, forgiven it, but it emerges from under the layered years of denial, popping up in the foreground like an expanded window on my Mac.

I no longer feel the ice-blue resentment against that clique; I was never a part of it anyway, and now, in a rear-view rush of gratitude, I know I will never be. That brand of exile no longer has the power to terrify me like it did, perhaps because I don’t look for mirrors to reflect my identity, or even my existence, any more. I’ve learnt to bite it back like I do every winter in New York.

San Francisco, you bitchcold city. But I must be a little kinder to you, you helped me become who I am today.

I sit on the 21st Floor of 135 Main Street. Swanlike ships glide under the Bay Bridge, leaving frothy white trails on an intense blue Pacific. I stare at my Mac, so grateful to be finally accepted.

A man with the grey beard sits cross-legged like a technological mystic, talking Microsoft on the carpet everyone has tread upon with their shoes, ruffling my cultural obsessive-compulsive sensibilities ever so little. Ah, he smokes, which makes him less civilized then. A narrow brown woman, softly scornful and unobvious in her beauty, flashes me a smile as she walks up the stairs to finish her strategy document.

There are others who make little impact on me, all with that cookie-cutter question-mark intonation, that same, pale, manufactured look, perhaps their only raison d’etre to please the mammoth, swallowing corporate powers-that-be.

A bus beeps – that same beep I have heard so often on Howard Street. The smells of Starbucks on California Street whisper memories into my nostrils again, and the late September air, with a little shiver in it, wipes in vignettes of Embarcadero Center and the howling fog around.

The honking of enraged New York traffic wakes me up to a new reality.

Everything is the same, yet everything is different. I'm still working on Microsoft, but I’m Ro, the New Yorker.

And my ultimate acceptance is only by myself.