We’re two lovers sitting quietly at the kitchen table, trying to find the right words to say.

Trying to pretend that those boxes in the corner don’t contain the contents of me and that this isn’t a one-way ticket. Trying to hold on for one more night to something that we both know has long since been over.

Yes there is someone else.

Yes I fell in love with them.

Yes I am leaving you.

But am I? Do you ever really leave the place that you were from? Does it ever really leave you? There are some loves you just don’t ever get over.

This is one of them.

WHEN WE MET

But let’s start at the beginning.

I met California twenty-one years ago on a hot morning in July. My first, screaming breath was of coastal air. My first, teetering steps were stolen on sun-soaked floors. By the time I could talk I was already utterly entrenched, completely wound up in, and forever intertwined with the West Coast. It was the only world I knew, the only one I thought I would ever need to.

Over the course of the years that followed, you could say that we were in our honeymoon phase. Memories of eating cucumber sandwiches on the sand and running barefoot into bubblegum sunsets flood my mind. I would wake up and immediately dash outside, spending whole days swinging from trees and cartwheeling in the grass until the very last drop of sunlight fell out of the sky and my mother would open a window and beg me to come inside. It was a fight.

I loved it that much.

I loved weekends spent driving up to Los Angeles for pool parties and barbecues with family. I loved placing my little palms on my aunt’s belly and feeling my cousin kick for the first time. I loved Disneyland and Bel Air and even the scorching baseball fields my brother’s long tournaments were held at. The ones I learned how slowly time can pass at. I don’t think it will ever pass that slowly again.

I loved my street with it’s Spanish style homes. I loved my home. The swimming pool in the back and the hammock strung between two trees in the front. I loved how the asphalt would blacken and burn my feet in the summer and how wide open the sky always seemed. How impossibly blue and never-ending it was.

WANTING MORE

And then, invariably, that love began to change. Slowly, it occurred to me that the world existed beyond the bounds of what I knew. That this place was not, in fact, every place. That there was more, and that I wanted it.

My eyes began to wander. The relentless sun became oppressive, the lack of seasons disorienting. I was craving things that California could not give to me.

I met New York. I met New York like you meet someone in a bar—dazed, confused, and not looking for anything serious. I didn’t try to fall in love, I’m not even sure of the exact moment that it happened, only that it did. After that, I don’t think all of me ever returned to California. New York kept a part of me, using it like a bargaining chip to entice me back into its chaotic embrace.

In the years that followed, I longed for that piece of me more and more. I thought incessantly about it. I hung pictures of New York on my bedroom walls and read anything I could about anyone who ever loved that place like I did. Joan Didion. Patti Smith. Colson Whitehead. Bill Hayes. As I daydreamed, California stood in the corner and watched like a loyal spouse, hoping and praying that it was nothing serious. That it was just something fun, that it was anything, anything at all, but love.

I suppose we all know how that one went.

But this isn’t about New York. This is about the place I am leaving for it.

A CITY IS A STORYTELLER

I would stay in California for many more years. Years that, while filled with longing for someplace else, were also filled of unchecked love for it’s sunlight and warmth.

For it’s açaí shacks and hole-in-the-wall Mexican food joints and sunsets that bled pink and purple all over the beach. For it’s farmer’s markets and downtown, the downtown I have long since outgrown but loved incessantly for as long as it let me. For it’s stupidly comical college life and the general lack of urgency that plagues it’s pedestrians. For no one wearing clothes, let alone shoes. For endless golden light and scorching hot Octobers. And mostly, for it being the place that raised me. It was everything I ever needed, until it wasn’t.

All to say, I have loved San Diego.

How could I not? A city is a storyteller and this one knows all of mine.

I became a child, an adolescent, and an adult here. I graduated kindergarten, high school, and college here. New York may have stolen a part of me all those years ago, but California never even had to try. As far as I’m concerned, the little girl that I was will always be swinging on that playground, pointing her toes to the blue sky. The teenage me will always be eating açaí on the beach or wandering the halls of the art museum. And my college self? She will always be reading Brönte in some nook of that drunken campus over too much coffee, writing about the whole thing. They are not going anywhere.

They belong here, even if I don’t anymore.

So this is it. We’re two lovers, sitting across from one another, trying to find the right words to say. Because what do you say? What can you say?

All I know is this.

I love you California, but this is where I leave you. Right here where I have loved you.

And always will.

Good morning ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of our airline, it is my pleasure to welcome you aboard this flight with non-stop service to New York City.

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