This is going to be a tricky one. Basically, I want to write a letter to everyone I met in this stupid city. Well, not everyone. I actually have no interest in writing my friends or my co-workers or anyone like that. I want to write the chance encounters, the people I barely know, the ones I couldn't have said more than two words to.

I want to write a letter to all of you: the pretty girl from the coffee shop who stopped working after I moved, that guy I talked to about metalworking outside of Hotel Tropicana, the girl I met who grew weed on a mountain, the cab driver who smoked a cigarette with me outside of that spa party, the homeless guy who played a guitar without strings, the fixture from The Future, the guy with the lisp from that house party, Helen from Arizmendi, the guy who did natural language processing at Apple, the naturalist from the whale-watching trip. In this airport, sitting, staring out the window at nothing it's you that I can't stop thinking of. It reminds me of when you vacuum or tidy up or whatever and you find a little piece of inexplicable but clearly massively functional plastic that was obviously once the lynchpin of whatever contraption it once belonged to. Each of you feels to me like one of those pieces of plastic. Why did we say those things to each other? What about the things I wanted to say to you but didn't because I felt shy or because it didn't feel appropriate or because I didn't feel like it would matter. But this is ridiculous. I'm almost sure it really wouldn't have mattered--I'm almost sure that it wouldn't have mattered if we'd never met in the first place. You almost definitely feel the same way about me. And yet here I am, sitting in this airport, walking up and down the long corridor of memory pondering each one of you like a museum panorama. My closest friends, the familiar faces, the food and laughter and sex: these could not be further from my mind. Instead I'm endlessly wondering over each of our little, meaningless exchanges.

Funny, I feel so strongly that our little meetings couldn't have mattered less and yet I feel more defined by these encounters than by every supposedly deep dinner party conversation I've ever had. Probably because when I talk to you, you nameless other, you weird mirror, I dig so deep into myself I scrape bedrock. I look at your face, your giant face with its huge, unflinching eyes boring into me with affability and warmth or maybe not or its hard to tell and all of a sudden I'm swirling around some kind of drain with your big face right at the center. What do you want from me? What do I want from you? Our little conversations are such blunt fractured crystals, little narrative shards with no beginning and no end. Each one is like a little lifetime, and indeed I don't think either one of us is quite the same person before or after our meeting. There we are talking about where we live and where we eat and whether our respective neighborhoods are whichever combination of loud, expensive, energetic or laid-back, and maybe just like me you're really thinking about being born and about dying and how much more there is to think and to learn and how much we wish this conversation, right here, would be the Reason and that we open our eyes and see each other and walk out into the world like people or something.

Or something. But here I can't even write a sentence anymore, let alone disentangle San Francisco the city from turning 23 or from eating a burrito or from being mortal.