Returning is always a little sad. All the things that I usually remember about a place have changed in subtle or striking ways. Certain people might be gone, and things have inevitably changed in a way that is inconsistent with nostalgia. For a long time I avoided returning all together, now I just make a conscious effort to treat returning as a new experience rather than a continuation of an old one. When combined with the curse of traveling — where you end up knowing and loving people in many different places and are always missing someone or something somewhere — the whole thing can be hard. So with all of this in my heart, I returned to San Francisco with the intentional idea that I was stepping into something new.