Happy Sunday. I have spent the entire weekend lying out under the sun with a stack of books, as per usual.

I also received a postcard from an old friend that brought back allll the memories. Here’s why.

When we were sixteen my friend and I got comically into hiking. I would be parked outside of her house just as the sun was coming up, my seat reclined and my feet poking out of the window waiting for her to climb in with her mug of oatmeal and jar of sunflower seed butter. We would always pick up giant coffees and then hike for hours through fields of wildflowers, stopping to climb trees or wade through a shallow creek. It was a brief time in our lives where nothing else truly seemed to exist. We were, in hindsight, teetering on the very edge of what would be a sharp and steep fall from innocence. One that would yank us far from each other and far from those carefree mornings. But we didn’t know any of that yet. We were babies climbing trees with bare feet and long messy hair.

When we finally did teeter over the edge, we lost each other somewhere in mid-air. One minute we were in girlhood, running bare foot through the streets of Ocean Beach at two a.m. after long nights of cross-legged conversations on bedroom floors. We were blasting music and sneaking onto playgrounds and pressing flowers into the palms of each others hands all before sunrise. We were sticking our heads out of the passenger side window with nothing but the ocean to catch us if we veered too far to the right. There was danger and love in that freedom and it danced like fire on the tips of our tongues.

And then we were simply worlds away from it all. We didn’t wake up with the sun anymore. We didn’t hang from trees or wade through creeks or pass bottles around like secrets. Sometimes I felt as if I really had fallen into the ocean during one of those coastal drives and that that was why everything had suddenly gone so black and so quiet. I remember the stillness. The lack of air. The feeling of floating. The numb sensation of staring up the cliff where the life I knew was still roaring down the road with all the windows down. But it wasn’t my life anymore.

It would be years before we came together again, but came together again we did. On the other side of innocence, we met each other all over again. Changed, but still just the same in all the ways that only someone who has known you since girlhood can recognize. Today, while separated by distance, she remains one of the most beautiful humans I know. The kind that will bake you a cake and drive it across town in the middle of a sticky July for your birthday. The kind that sends you actual postcards from all the exotic places she visits.

I received one of those treasured postcards the other day. Serendipitously, considering the post I had just written, it was from Joshua Tree. On the back she wrote about how much our sixteen-year-old selves would have loved it there, about how we would have pressed our bare feet to the wildflowers and have gotten absolutely “lost and found in the solace of the stars”.

But what really got me, what inspired this whole post, was the last line where she scrawled “those girls would be so happy now”. When I read those words, I wanted to cry. For it occurred to me how far we have come and how much we have survived since being those teenagers. It occurred to me that despite everything, despite the years that felt like war and the ones that felt like nothing at all, those girls still live inside of us. Maybe they didn’t die, even though it felt like it for a long time. They just grew. They managed to become whole, beautiful people who still think of those early spring hikes when the wildflowers start to bloom. And the thought of holding their hands now, all this time later, and telling them that they will be alright, feels something like medicine.

So this is to the people that we lose and find again, especially when those people are ourselves.

Click here to read more about what it felt like to come-of-age and here to read about what saved me.

JOIN THE FUN

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