Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

by Aspen Matis

We walked for peaceful hours, sliding in and out of quirky districts: the waterfront world of the Embarcadero, past the Ferry Building’s fresh citrus stands and seaside cafés, into a community constructed along a three-mile engineered seawall from which wide clusters of floating wooden rafts housing plump sunbathing sea lions extended into the Bay, the creatures’ rhythmic barks like feral songs; North Beach with its Italian coffee bars and red and beige tablecloth homemade pasta shops, and the notorious storefront of City Lights bookstore like a sacred beatnik temple, its black and white checkered floor and arched wood doorways to corridors of books in every color, a high wide rainbow of brave stories; coastal Fort Mason, that hamlet with periwinkle hills beyond vibrant turquoise water and grass pure shamrock green, smelling of sunbaked rocks, the distant great orange-rose Golden Gate Bridge like a dollhouse model of itself, a wonder; the willow groves and red maples of the Presidio, leafy and profoundly lush.

Maybe this means something if you’ve been there. I was bored