By Coco-Lily Garrett-Kellett
Bernal Heights isn’t a neighbourhood. It’s a state-sponsored hallucination disguised as real estate. A topographical hiccup populated by cultishly polite adults raised on Montessori trauma and shadowbanned desires. It smells like rosemary and repressed kink. The eucalyptus trees tilt like gossiping aunts. The fire hydrants judge your footwear. The raccoons have trauma-informed boundaries and better conflict-resolution skills than your ex.
I lived here for a year. I’d do it again – but as a different girl—a girl with venom in her tear ducts and a brain sharp enough to julienne tofu. Back then, I was soft in the wrong places. Now, I know exactly where to aim.
My Maslow’s hierarchy starts lower – less survival, more séance. It begins not with water or warmth but with:
– a lint-furred peach ring swiped from the hoodie of someone who once believed in God,
– a Soviet farming pamphlet reborn as a zine,
– and a therapist who tells me I’m not special – but does it in perfect meter, like a Shakespearean diss track.
What I want is microscopic, unhinged, sacred:
A stranger in a BART windbreaker whispering the origins of time into my vape cloud.
A biodegradable coffin shaped like a Swatch.
Someone, anyone, to permit me to vanish.
It was another afternoon of being psychologically frisked by the wind – sharp, prosecutorial, like a disgraced philosopher temping in customer support. I climbed Folsom like a petty little death god in conceptual heels, humming with that specific delusion reserved for girls who’ve overanalyzed every ellipsis ever texted at them. The pavement sneered under my boots like it had seen my diary and wasn’t impressed. A crow locked eyes with me and ran a forensic audit on my soul, pausing meaningfully on the Thomas Incident of 2009. He knew. Of course, he knew.
My eyes think before I do. They’ve already decided: men don’t need haircuts. They should be allowed only to open difficult jars, fix modems, and die beautifully in wheat fields. Here in Bernal Heights, masculinity is a performance art piece with artisanal funding. If you’re not barefoot, crying, and cradling a sourdough starter like it’s your last hope – you’re probably a landlord.
Last night, I rewatched all three of The Human Centipede movies as an act of spiritual exfoliation. It’s not a film – it’s an economic allegory. A kink turned bureaucratic. A supply chain crisis in a gimp mask. It belongs not in a theatre but projected on eyelids in the purgatory between punishment and prayer.
Charlotte Kemp Muhl once said seven was the number of God and six belonged to Satan, according to Pythagoras. She also advocated for a roadkill cookbook. I think about this every time I pass a flattened opossum beside a Tesla charger – an omen, pancaked by optimism. Even the wildlife here has impostor syndrome.
Sometimes I think Bob Ross was a murderer. Not violently – lyrically. A brush instead of a blade. Every “happy little tree” was a grave. Every river: a baptismal misdirection. San Francisco loves people like that – people who smile while disappearing you. Here, violence smells like Aesop and says it’s poly.
And me? I want to be remembered the way mildew remembers moisture.
I want someone to say, “You remind me of a smell I forgot from my grandmother’s kitchen the day before she died.”
I want to be the feeling of being almost home but taking the long way just to suffer.
I want to be the scent trapped in someone’s collar after a particularly bad week.
So I climb the inverted pyramid of myself, built from eviction notices, expired prescriptions, and Craigslist emails that say “still available?” but never follow up. At the peak, a non-binary barista holds a dead pigeon like it’s the first draft of God. They look at me with eyes like waterlogged coins and say:
“You made it. But we’re all ghosts here.”
And I nod, because I already knew. The fog rolls in – thick as regret, familiar as shame – and I let it have me.
Because I am here. Not better. Just sharper. And I know exactly where to cut.
