I'm reading "Peculiar Chris", by Johann S Lee. So what, you might ask. Well, it's a book by Ben's best friend, who now lives in London. It was the first successful gay novel ever published in Singapore (where Ben is from), over a decade ago, and it is not only partly dedicated to Ben, but also includes a character modeled on him. It's a coming-out story, of course, and although it's naive I do find it quite touching. I'm still awaiting the sure recognition of Ben in one of the characters. Ben says it will be obvious. But so far, with over half the book gone, the only possibility is an officer in the Singapore army who went to Yale, like Ben did. But he's a morose, quiet, unromantic character, totally unlike the Ben I know: so I'm hoping that's not Ben. Besides, in the army Ben was a sharp-shooter not a requisitions-and-supply officer. Yes, I'm involved with somebody who can shoot the center out of the Ace of Spades out at fifty yards.

A complete change of subject. The thing is done. I left San Francisco this morning for the last time, after twelve years. Twelve years that began in still youthful innocence, then became twisted by a horrible relationship that plunged me into a severe depression. The middle years were a period of isolation, where I lived in the Castro but kept myself free from what I viewed as its taints; I was a hermit, apart from a very few friends. Then I began to come back out of my shell, and started to tackle the big things holding me back; my chronic fatigue, the damage done by that bad relationship, and the left-over insecurities of childhood. And that process left me in a place where I felt strong enough to be an equal in a loving relationship. And Ben came along just at the right time. So here I am, leaving San Francisco, for a new life - a life I'd have thought inconceivable a couple of years ago.

Ben and I drove down to San Francisco on Friday night: I drove the whole way. For the first half of the journey, we chatted, or played word games from my childhood like "The Minister's Cat", a game where you take turns ascribing adjectives beginning with a given letter to the feline creature belonging to said official until one of you can't come up with something.

As the night grew late, Ben started to fall asleep, waking up fitfully now and then to keep a watch on the speedometer (he thinks I'm prone to driving too fast), and rain began to come out of the nighttime dessert skies. We finally reached the turn off I-5 onto 580, and the final, hour-long stretch of increasingly familiar road-signs culminating in the hills approaching Oakland. We got to my apartment by one in the morning. It felt odd to be returning there after a month living in Ben's house in the San Fernando Valley. Was I returning home? The apartment was so comfortable, inviting and familiar (I'd left lights and heating on the whole month - shockingly extravagant and wasetful, I know). Yet I knew that I'd be leaving it for the last time on Monday morning.

The move had been planned for a few weeks, but last week a huge spanner was thrown in the works by my company's insistence that I come to New York on Monday for eight days. The only way my complicated move could go ahead was if Ben was to fly down the day before the move (this coming Friday) and supervise it for me, then drive my SUV to LA down I-5. Ben volunteered to do it without my even asking him; I'm learning the true meaning of the word "partner."

So today I'm flying to New York, not Los Angeles, and Ben is flying home to LA to return on Thursday night for one unpleasant, lonely night in an apartment piled high with moving boxes. It's going to be a tough week in New York, since they're trying to squeeze six weeks of work into eight days, which means I'm probably going to have to work evenings and the weekend.

We spent most of the day on Saturday packing, after breakfast at It's Delectable on 18th Street. I wasn't even sure that we'd be able to get everything done over the course of the weekend, but by five it was clear that between the two of us we'd already gotten much more than half the work done, so we went to the gym and worked out together for a while. Then it was time to get ready for my goodbye dinner with my closest friends at 2223, my favorite restaurant.

I'd been long worried about my goodbye dinner: worried that people wouldn't come. But almost everybody I invited came, and we made a convivial, disparate group along a long table in the back room of the restaurant. Everybody seemed to get along, despite the fact that few people knew many of the others very well. Brett touched me deeply with a beautiful speech about how happy he was for me and Ben, despite that the night was the end of a long period where we'd been each other's best friend. And my old straight friend James chimed in with an awkward but equally heartfelt speech about how both he and I had found a great partner (he's recently married and his wife, Tiffany, is expecting their first child any day now) within a year of each other. Cecilia started off a story about our driving together to LA just after I'd gotten my new car, and how terrified I'd been by Cecilia's hesitant, uncertain driving through a thunderstorm. Then it was my turn to speak. I'd imagined that I'd speak of how incredibly lucky I felt to have met the love of my life, and burst into tears. But instead I just said that I'd been fortunate to have been graced with such wonderful friendships over my years in San Francisco, and I proposed a toast to all of them. After dinner, Ben and I walked up Market Street with my three closest friends from San Francisco: Brett, Cecilia and Heike, and said goodbye to them one by one as they headed home.

Later that night, Ben and I went dancing briefly at Mezzanine, more to mark my final weekend in San Francisco than anything else. Our heart wasn't really in it, and we stayed in the club less than an hour. We got up late on Sunday morning, had a lazy brunch, and spent only two or three more hours in the afternoon finishing up the packing. Then, after dinner sitting outside, under heat lamps, at the restaurant Blue on Market Street, we attempted to see a movie - "I Heart Huckabees", but left half way through it in a tired daze, not getting the point of the movie at all, and returned home with the Sunday New York Times, reading it cozily in the living room, me lying on the shaggy rug, Ben on the padded bench seats. I'd been in the strangest mood for most of the day; a mood I couldn't place. I wasn't sad, or depressed, or particularly nostalgic. But at times I felt like shouting just to clear out whatever mood it was that was making me feel weird. I think it worried Ben a little. It must have been again the feeling of displacement; packing up my apartment in San Francisco, but not even heading back with Ben to LA; going instead for a difficult week in Winter-time New York.

When you're leaving somewhere or someone after a long period of intimacy, it's hard to feel that the final moments are indeed final. Those moments seem so routine and familiar: the reality that they will never be repeated only dawns on you much later. That was the case with saying goodbye to my friends. It was hard to imagine that things were changing. When it came time to say goodbye to San Francisco, and more specifically, the Castro and my apartment, I strove to fix some final moments in my memory. On Sunday, when walking up Castro Street towards 19th Street after brunch; I looked across the street and remembered so many other times walking up the street in all kinds of states of mind: cocky, depressed, sad, sexually excited, bored, tired; and unbidden tears came to my eyes and I grabbed Ben and hugged him close. Ben cried too, whether from empathy or because he's feeling guilty at stealing me away from San Francisco. The other time was when we were leaving the apartment this morning. Ben was waiting in the open doorway, and I stopped with my suitcase and looked over at the comfortable, padded benches lining the living-room windows; the seats where Ben and I had had sex the Saturday morning of Gay Pride Weekend when I'd picked him up from the airport after his flight from Singapore. On that wonderful, morning, as the sun streamed in on us and warmed our bodies, we looked at each other in surprise at the passion we both felt (it was the first moment I realized that I might have fallen in love with Ben) and I said "Can anything possibly be better than this?" Now, looking at the empty seats, surrounded by cardboard boxes, tears came again. I grabbed my luggage, shooed Ben out the door, and locked it behind me.