Howdy.

The big storm that has shut San Diego down has turned out to be nothing more than some light rain. Is anyone surprised? No. Are San Diegans incapable of dealing with anything but seventy degrees and sunny? Possibly. But does this all give the rare event that is rain an irresistible, romantic allure? yEs. Always.

So you could call this a rainy day diary entry.

MILK RUN

I ran out early this morning to get oat milk for my coffee and ended up driving around, just watching the world wake up. I’m pretty sure that San Diegans think that raindrops are made of actual battery acid, so the streets were empty, giving them a movie set-like feel. Cafés and bagel shops were turning their lights on, displaying weary-eyed employees sleep-walking through their morning tasks. I know those tasks well. Tables out. Chairs down. Coffee on. But not this morning.

This morning the world was mine to drink in. So I sipped slowly, hearing tires rolling down wet pavement and thinking that that might be the greatest sound of all time. Car lights reflected off of the glossy black asphalt in shades of red and white. A few early birds clutched coffee mugs in one hand and dog leashes in the other. The world feels pure in the early morning, as if it was reset every night and has yet to be polluted by the commotion of daily life. I think I fall a little bit more in love with it in those hours. It’s like seeing a friend or a lover first thing in the morning, before they have had the chance to alter themselves. You feel let in on a secret. It’s intimate and somehow more real than anything else. I think I might live for that.

THE END OF AN ERA

Later in the day, I ran into my neighbor who has a daughter starting kindergarten tomorrow. She called it the end of an era with a smile. But to me, about to finish school, it sounded a lot more like the beginning of one. Which, made me think about perspective. I’ve been so emotional about this being my last semester, about everything that these next few months will mark the end of. It’s sad, like a mother watching her baby walk into her first day of school. But it’s also a beginning. And I mean, yeah, obviously, right? But it feels deeper than that. It feels like accepting that I will leave these classrooms in pursuit of bigger, brighter things.

I read these lines the other day from a poem by Adrienne Rich that really moved me. We’ll dream of a longer summer but this is the one we have: I lay my sunburnt hand on your table: this is the time we have. 

I think of how this would resonate with my neighbor and how it also resonates with me, just in different dimensions. And about how that is maybe the beauty of having friends of different ages, because it allows you perspective. It sucks you out of the vacuum that being young can often entrap you within. If I spent all of my time with other twenty-one year olds, I think it would be harder to see very far beyond twenty-one.

SUNKEN SHIPS

Inspired by (shocker) another one of Natalie Goldberg‘s prompts: Write about a hill that you once knew.

My closest friend in high school lived in a blue house right by the ocean. It was on a long hill that led you down to the beach. We used to walk up and down that hill all of the time to go to farmer’s markets at sunset or get açaí bowls. I practically lived there. It was at the bottom of that hill on a random sunny afternoon that she told me she was moving halfway across the country. That she wouldn’t be there to see the end of adolescence with us. That move turned out to be every bit as disastrous and heartbreaking as we imagined it would be. It was one of those moments in life where you just know that nothing will ever be the same, that something momentous has just ended without your permission. The last thing she ever gave me, while standing in the middle of the airport, about to miss her flight, was a beautiful journal to write in. I’ve never forgotten that.

I actually ran into her a few months back on my college campus. She had just transferred in and I thought that I was seeing a ghost. I was on a phone call and I remember going speechless and hanging up with whoever it was as this ghost approached me. We talked for a while in that way that you do with people you used to know but can’t really say that you know anymore. We said the natural thing about needing to get together for coffee, even though I think that  we both knew that some friendships are just too weighed down by the past to ever truly make it back up to the surface again. It would be like trying to make an iron weight float, when all it wants is to sink down to the ocean floor and decorate some sunken ship. 

I think of my mind like that. Like a microcosm of the earth, where there is ocean, land, and sky. Past, present, and future. And the thing is, there are sunken ships all over the ocean floor. Ones that I can never visit for long without needing to claw my way back up to the surface for air. You want to stay. You want to look around and swim through the rotting boards and hollowed out windows, just to see it all again. But there’s no air that far down. There’s no promise of life. 

So you float back up to where the sun’s rays are beaming through the water in golden streaks and to where you can break the surface and breathe fresh air again. Alive and inside of this moment again, able to see the blueness of the sky again.

And it is, so blue.

Love, m.

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