I came back to San Francisco after twenty-two years away.

It was love at first sight the first time, and the second time was no different … except that I already knew the streets. Reacclimating was like riding a bicycle. Within weeks I was grounded here like I’d never left, in the city where my heart and soul have always kept an address.

I arrived carrying two things I didn’t announce to anyone.

The first was a job of twenty years that I could feel slipping. Eight bosses in three years will teach you the shape of what’s coming, whether or not you’re ready to say it out loud. The second was my only child, struggling to find her way, and me trying to be steady for her while nothing under my own feet was.

So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I walked the city and I photographed it.

This is that book. Fog on the hills and light on the water, made by a man who was afraid and went out anyway … which is, I’ve come to understand, the only condition in which anyone makes anything. Somewhere in those twenty months I stopped waiting to feel certain before taking the next step. I never did learn what was coming. I learned that I could move without knowing.

That turned out to be the life I’d been trying to live the whole time.

I Really Did Leave My Heart in Ess Eff is the second book in a series that includes Keep Looking Up and Losing My Distortion. It is currently in progress.