Often, especially in my final year of high school and the year after, I would ride the long way home after leaving the bike shop. The long way involved turning left up into Golden Gate Park, with its forests becoming more imposing in the dark, and then turning right at Skatin’ Place, where, during the day, the city skates. I would follow JFK Promenade through the park, the scenery changing from rolling hills to more dramatic canyon walls covered in evergreens. Eventually, I would turn off JFK Promenade at Transverse, where the rumbling death machines were allowed back onto it, and I would switch to Overlook Drive, at first an unassuming maintenance road through the park, which quickly revealed itself to be carved into the side of an increasingly dramatic valley. Eventually it flattens out at Middle Drive, and then dives down one last time to meet the now Great Highway, which exists in a border land, between ocean and city, human’s kingdom and nature’s.

In July of 2023, Hansel died. Hansel had spent the last three years of their life defending their new found freedom. In 2020, when the city closed the Great Highway to cars creating a wonderful oceanfront park, Hansel learned to ride a bike. They were 35. They had moved to San Francisco from the Philippines when they were 4, and had lived in the Outer Sunset ever since. The city had been trying to return the road to cars, and a dedicated community had formed around the fight to keep our park. Hansel was one of the most passionate and personally connected to the park. That community had been my home away from increasingly uncomfortable home for the past year.

Every week on Thursday, we would hold community night at the bike shop, ending at 9 or later, and every night, I would ride home from the bike shop, down through the park, onto the Great Highway in its empty, foreboding, foggy, comforting emptiness. I would get there around 10pm or later, and I would spend the next 30 minutes slowly riding south down the asphalt, listening to the waves crash 300 feet to my right, and the occasional bus dumping its air into the quiet Outer Sunset night to my left.

When Hansel died, the sounds of the Pacific—the one that had comforted Hansel so many times in their gay, catholic, angsty childhood and through their adult life—took on new meaning. I started stopping about halfway down the crumbling road, where the dunes fall away and the ocean becomes visible and turn off the lights on my bike. I’d stop my music and sit on a guard rail on the edge and listen to the ocean. I’d let the fog envelop me, and, I’d sit. I’d whisper a hello to the ocean for Hansel, I’d thank it for being there. I would come out to it, because I didn’t get the chance to come out to Hansel, who was like a queer elder to me. It wouldn’t respond.

I would get back on my bike, colder, wetter, emptier, and ride the rest of the way to the end of the road. I’d wait at the quiet, foggy, red glowing bus stop for the L Bus that would take me back up into the mountains of San Francisco, the one I had been riding since I discovered the magic of the Pacific, of the Outer Sunset, when I still rode a skateboard. The bus that would take me back up the long hill I had just skated down.

In November, I moved in with my mother full time, and stopped taking the long way home. My new ride involved crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, on its narrow pedestrian paths long after they closed to pedestrians for the night. Here too I would stop, listening to the ocean 300 feet below me, thinking of Hansel. In July, they had crossed the bridge for their third and final time. Everyone else I knew’s crossings numbered even.