Place, the metaphorical and literal environment that we walk through, has always fascinated me. Where we come from, where we choose to go, the places we love and the places we don’t—it all seems to have an undeniable effect on who we turn out to be. Growing up in San Diego, I spent my childhood sun-kissed and barefoot. I was perpetually outside, running under a blue sky that I thought went on forever as blackbirds and airplanes flew over my head. I fell in love with being out in the world, alone. As I grew up and my freedom expanded, I came to learn the city like the back of my hand. Certain spaces became sanctuaries and incubators for the person that I was becoming. I found who I was within them. I think we all have those spaces, the ones we can still feel our former selves within when we return to them. These are are mine.

the san diego museum of art

When I was seventeen, I used to ditch my last period to wander the halls of the art museum in Balboa Park. My admission, as a technical child, was free, so I went several times a week. I would step inside and find myself in another world, a world that, after long days of being a wallflower on a high school campus, I felt safe in. I wandered those galleries for hours, gliding up and down the marble staircases like a ghost in a trance. I remember there was this one room, a temporary installation, where you would sit down in darkness and watch as three screens lit up before your eyes. They showcased a digital display of abstract neurons dancing and dying and being reborn in an endless loop. I used to sit there and cry. It was that beautiful to me. Other times I would listen to classical music and walk slowly through every room with my open journal in hand, stopping to stare at paintings that I felt were a part of me. I remember that, in my angsty state, being surrounded by all of that art made me feel less alone in my intense experiences of the world. It was comforting to be surrounded by the creations of people who seemed to have also felt everything a little too much. And so that museum became my church and art became my religion. Within its walls, nothing else mattered. I still visit all of the time.

Dark Horse Coffee, Golden Hill

Growing up in North Park, I watched trendy coffee shops pop up on every corner. I have gone to all of them. I love several, simultaneously. But Dark Horse always had its own thing going. It has a cult following and I became a member at an early age. I used to go to the Golden Hill location, with it’s quirky architecture and view of downtown, with my journal and a bag full of books every chance that I got. It was the first place I drove to when I got my license and the place I would take all of my dates to over the coming years. I would sit outside, stare out at the city skyline, and read for hours. I loved the space that it allowed for me to be whoever I wanted within, a feeling of freedom not often afforded to sixteen year olds. I was always talking to strangers, learning bits of who they were before we went our separate ways. I loved those brief encounters. I loved to just sit and observe people as they came and went. It became a microcosm of the world that I could not wait to go out in. All of these years later, as I finish my degree in English, I still go back and sit there with my books. I watch as memories dance around me like scenes from a movie, and I think of how formative spaces are on who we turn out to be.

Gabriels Tortillas

A hole in the wall tortilleria located off Imperial Ave, this place is a best kept secret. When you grow up fifteen minutes from the border, you get spoiled with freshly made tortillas whenever you want them. I have countless memories of walking into the tiny shop and seeing hot corn tortillas moving along a conveyor belt and falling into steaming stacks. The distinct smell is always is my nose, like a memory burned into my senses. We would buy one of those stacks and open it on the drive home, my older brother showing me how to bite holes into the warm tortilla so that it looked like a face. I can still see him sitting in the front seat, holding the circle up so that I could see his eyes through it. It is still the only place that I go when I need tortillas, a place that, above any other, makes me feel like a seasoned local in my hometown.

Downtown

Downtown became my playground as soon as I was old enough to traverse it. I fell in love with everything about it, a love that catalyzed my already-incubating love for New York City. Whether at the Saturday farmer’s market in Little Italy or in a pop-up art gallery in East Village, I became utterly entranced by metropolitan life the first time I tasted it. I would put on a funky outfit and spend the whole day walking around the city, from one end to the other. I would talk to random people and take photos and was often scrawling something in my journal in the middle of the sidewalk, overcome by inspiration. Those streets inspired me like no other place could. The energy of them, the feeling I got when I would crane my neck up the sides of buildings to see where corporate America ended and the sky began, it electrified me. Going to baseball games on the weekends and drinking overpriced lattes on Friday afternoons, it all became a part of me. I even worked my first job at a restaurant downtown. I would walk around on Saturday nights after my shift observing a world that I was not yet old enough to partake in. Bars and clubs and restaurants exploded all around me, the music and laughter and clinking drinks all drawing my wide eyes in. Those streets became my secret escape. Walking all over them formed my identity and taught me to be city savvy. I learned them like the back of my hand. They gave me the confidence that would lead me to fly to New York years later, alone, and try my hand at a much bigger playground.

Coronado beach

When I was a teenager, I got my heart broken so badly that I thought it would kill me. I could not speak. I could barely breathe. But nearly every day that summer, I went to this beach, the first one I ever walked upon as a a child. It was the one place that soothed the ache in my chest, the one place that seemed to understand. I would sit in the sand with the hot July sun burning my skin, and feel connected to something so beyond anything that words can express. I would float on my back in the ocean, under a blue sky, and feel a cathartic release in the violence of the waves. They seemed to mirror the waves of grief that crashed through me. I felt completely stripped down, floating along the edge of a continent, held by the embrace of the earth. It healed me. I loved how just like each of us, especially after heartbreak, the beach is never twice the same. Just like how our own flesh and blood recycle themselves, so too do those waters. The same substances, the same general appearance, yet utterly and irrevocably changed. I still go back to this beach every time I need to ground myself. It always feels like being cracked right open, like coming home.

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