we meet at ritual

We meet at Ritual, a friend and I.

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Meeting at Ritual is our ritual.

Ritual has been closed for renovations for a while, but it’s open again. 

I think I like the way it looked before better. It was darker, moodier, a little more rough around the edges. Now it feels clean and corporate to me. But maybe I just need to get used to it. Sometimes I’m not good at getting used to the way things are, when I prefer the way things were.

There’s art on the walls right now by Paul Madonna, an artist whose work, which often combines text with images of San Francisco, I’ve always enjoyed. He seems to see stories and aspirations and yearnings in the world around him all the time, and I think I do, too.

Right now the lights hanging from the ceiling of Ritual look like this:

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(photo by Jonathan McIntosh)

but they used to look like this:

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That’s one of the Paul Madonna drawings on the wall right now. It says, “I want to absorb every moment of this, enjoy every second, every smallest particle of perceptible time. I am so damn happy. And I’ve been alive long enough to know it’s all so damn fleeting.”

And looking at that image, I thought about how I said a kind of goodbye to someone once at Ritual when the lights still looked like that, and how I’d been almost greedy in clinging to every fraction of a moment I got with her because I knew it wouldn’t be much, and how I’ve spent so much of the time since then thinking and writing about time, and about how things are fleeting. 

Whenever I start feeling hopeful about someone, there is part of me that thinks, “Maybe all those things before were things you had to go through to be ready for this. Maybe this will make it all worth it.” Because I want to find some meaning in the disappointments of the past. I want to be able to look back and feel like I’ve found out what the wait was about. But I realize that this is a tremendous pressure to put on someone new, on something untested. 

So I tell my friend that I’m a little excited about someone. I’m trying not to be too excited. I’m trying to be just excited enough to really give it a chance and not be so excited that I’ll be crushed if it turns out to be nothing. But I don’t know if I can manage my feelings like that. I don’t know if I should manage my feelings like that.

Walking from left to right along the wall of Ritual, the last image you come to is this one:

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and it says “Though our roads lead to the same place, 
Our stories will be different when we get there.”

And I thought of the stories this person and I have been telling each other. And I thought how nice it would be if that turned out to be true.