When I was in eighth grade, we had to do a project about what school we wanted to go to in the future and I immediately thought of California.
In ninth grade, I bought a UCLA sweatshirt that felt like a great callback to that project.
During my senior year, we spent 10 days between LA and Pasadena and when my brother performed in the Tournament of Roses Parade with our high school’s marching band.
In my sophomore year of college, San Diego was the first city I saw in the continental US, after months abroad connecting with so many friends who happened to live or go to school in the area.
A few months after that, I spent a month going around the state with those same friends, solidifying the idea that ‘one day when I live here too’ and ‘oh, eventually we won’t be across the country from each other.’
In December, I returned to California, after our first pandemic adventure of quarantining together in Arizona. I stayed with friends, now spending the entire time in LA instead of San Diego, with a trip back up to NorCal just like that month-long trip the year before.
I had always held onto this idea of California being the place to be, not necessarily in an idealized way but in the sense that it just felt right. I loved the fact that the ocean was next to all of these cities and that so much nature was close by. I loved the idea of doing something separate from my life as it had been thus far. I wanted an adventure, to be independent and find myself outside of the confines of the suburb I had spent most of my life in. The version of me from all those years ago would have been thrilled to know that most of my closest friends would be from this place and that I would be planning to move to Southern California soon after my college graduation. It’s funny, the paths that life can take us down.
Life As We Know It
There was a day that Jenna was showing Hanna and I around Orange and there was a moment that took me by surprise. It wasn’t anything special, I think we were waiting to turn left at a stoplight or something of the sort, but that’s what made the realization hit me in the way it did.
It dawned on me that the simplicity of this moment, us just driving around and stopping into stores and doing relatively normal, daily things, is exactly what I had in mind as we started thinking about how our lives might connect after we were done sailing around the world together. The force of the fact that I could have never imagined that exact moment in time, yet that it was exactly what I had hoped our friendship would look like a couple of years down the road, it was like something that I did not even know to anticipate had come full circle.
The bittersweet realization that a moment is slipping away as it is happening, that the apartment or the hot tub or the versions of ourselves wouldn’t last forever. In fact, they are already long gone.
Another Beginning
I wrote the words above in December, then added a few more in January and maybe March or April, and here I am sitting at my kitchen table in my apartment in San Diego in August, thinking about how far gone those moments all seem.
I left the country again, to another place for a new reason, but I came back here. This is the first time since I was 17 that I’ll be living anywhere for longer than 4 months in a row. Given, I’m taking a trip this weekend and going to Iceland the next, before another trip and more plans and a life full of adventures that won’t wait just because I’ve moved my home base. But, I have.
My address is San Diego, California and this is no longer a place that I’ll come to stay awhile, but one that I get to come back to. One that I can come home to.
Home Is Where- Well, Where?
The idea of home is one that has always baffled me. Is it people? Or is it really one location? Or maybe, just maybe, it is something for one person and something different entirely for the next. I know that here, looking out at the base of the palm tree in front of my living room window, hearing one of my best friends working in her room, this is home. For now, maybe always. Maybe not.
Who knows, really? I could stay here forever, but I could also find something new, something even more right than this. For now, in this moment, I feel like I have everything I’ve ever wanted. But also, I have so much more.
It’s A Privelege
The roof over my head protects me from rain and shine alike. The kitchen is full of healthy food, packaged in sustainable ways because we have the luxury of supporting businesses like that. My friends are closer than they’ve been in so long, in a day-to-day sense, and the support in my life is tangible, even from family hundreds of miles away.
The absolute privilege that I have to be making plans, not only for trips but for dinner tomorrow, for the beach when I feel like touching the vast blue smudge that is the ocean or the doctor if I get hurt or the mall if I have anything I might possibly want. The privilege I have to not remember every single day how incredibly easy my life is, compared to those of so many.
Getting to move here is not only fulfilling something that I have hoped for, for so long but it is reminding me that there is beauty in every day and every place and that none of this should ever be taken for granted.
The Simple Things
One Sunday, Sierra and Jenna and I sat in the car as we drove to get my grandpa a birthday card and we talked about how nice that kind of moment was. One very much the same as that day in December with Hanna, but this time we acknowledged the beauty of the sheer simplicity of it all. Living here now means that plans do not always have to consist of more than a, ‘Come hang out this weekend?’ text. Grocery runs or trips to explore the area are just as fun and almost more exciting because it means that this is just life now. This is just where I live and who I am and being surrounded by those I hold most dear is a happy side effect of it all.
Now it is October, and two more months have passed in this place. The Iceland trip was a success, and coming home to our apartment in California felt as right as anything could. Road trips to Vegas and LA have mixed with Saturdays at the beach and nights out as we settle into the here and now of this new home. A home which we are so lucky to call ours, in a place I once came for vacation.
California, I love you and I can’t wait to see what’s next.
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