About a week ago this young woman, Mayya, wrote me on Facebook to say hello and share a music video of hers. I ran into her on the bus and she said, “Hey! Good to meet you in person.”

“Totally, it’s crazy how you just wrote and now we’re running into each other. That’s how the universe works though I guess. Wanna take a picture and tell me a story?”

“Yeah, what kinda story?”

“Well when did you move to San Francisco?”

“I was born in Russia but I’ve been living in the same apartment in the Tenderloin since I was 2.”

“How old are you now?”

“Eighteen.”

“That’s a good chunk of time. I lived in the TL for about a year and half. It’s an intense place. What’s an interesting story from your time there?”

“Ok, I got one. One time my mom came into my room at 3am and was like ‘Wake up, wake up! There’s a bomb in the building, so I start rushing out and I am thinking about what I’m going to take with me. I grabbed my guitar and my kaleidoscope. So we evacuated the building with all the other residents and stood in the lobby of some hotel. It ended up being a false alarm but was funny because I had lived there for so long, but didn’t know most of the people that lived there. There was this one guy in the hood called "The Karma Man”, he’s this Jamaican guy who’s really thin and walks really weird and he’ll ask you ‘Do you believe in karma?’, but what he’s getting at is if you do then you should give him money, but that’s not cool because he’s trying to use karma against people which is something you can’t do.“