I woke up this morning to a world blanketed in white.

Powdered sugar fell softly from the sky as I pulled a t-shirt over my head and ran outside. I have never seen it snow before, never seen the details of a snowflake or felt the crunch of crystallized sugar under my feet. I stood on my porch with one hand over my mouth and the other reaching out to touch a world I had only just in that moment been born into.

You’re not in California anymore.

WATCHING IT SNOW FOR THE FIRST TIME

It all looked like the imagery of my childhood fantasies, the ones that mirrored the winter wonderlands I saw on TV but could barely wrap my brain around under the harsh California sun of December.

I am so unaccustomed to the snow that my first thought this morning was of the powdered sugar my dad used to dust my french toast with. Of how delicately and softly it would coat my plate in a blanket of white. The flakes looked just like that as they cascaded and swirled through the air, as if someone were only just only shaking a sifter over the streets of Brooklyn for my amusement.

Slowly the blanket grew thicker, coating the vascular capillaries of the winter trees in thickening coats of spun cotton. New Yorkers long since accustomed to the winter came out and begrudgingly scraped their windshields as their marshmallow coat children stared in awe, like me. Coming someplace new is akin to being that child again, an infant in the womb of a world that you have never known. I might be twenty-one in California but I am just one week old in Brooklyn.

One week. I thought I would be craving some semblance of home by now. I thought I would be missing something. But I’m not. I can’t believe how much I’m not. When I was first in college, I missed home all of the time, and I was only a ten minute drive away. Honestly, I think that’s why I missed home. It was right there. Not to mention how absolutely I detested the environment I was immersed within. Drunken, spray-tanned twenty year olds devoted to drowning their brain cells in alcohol was never exactly my scene.

I mean I loved college. I loved reading the books and writing the papers and listening to the wisdom of professors. But the rest of it never once felt like home. I was utterly alien, and utterly alone.

But this, here, is home. I’m never the only one journaling in the coffee shop. I’m never the only one who bothered to get dressed. I’m never the only one with a book on the train. They have been telling me for years that I will find my people. Well I found them. They’re here. It just took a little time.

CHEERS TO ONE YEAR

Speaking of time, Spinning Visions is one year old today. One year of publicly documenting my experience of the world. Twelve months, 175 thousand words, and a far more infectious love for writing than I thought possible at the inception. How appropriate that it happens to also be the day of love.

These days, when I think about love, it is so different than it ever has been. The parameters of my perceptions of love used to be suffocating. Debilitating. Narrow and utterly crucifying.

Like most girls subjected to the horrors of early 2000s media, I learned to long for romantic love as a savior of sorts. Movies and TV shows and the nagging inquiries regarding my love life from nosy aunts around the dinner table all came together to teach me that love came from romantic relationships. (A theory bell hooks unravels with aching brilliance in All About Love.)

And then in high school, I had an English teacher who was very hippie-dippie in a I’m not going to prepare you for the AP exam, I’m going to prepare you for life kind of way. She was the one who gave me Cleo Wade’s gem of a book, Heart Talk, which I brought to my favorite coffee shop that Valentine’s Day and understood all at once that love was a far more multifaceted concept than anyone had ever informed me of.

Go figure.

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Slowly, my eyes opened up to the love that was actually sitting right under my nose, holding my hand. The love I had for the world and my experiences of it. The love that made me cry under a full, desert moon or over the heart-wrenching prose of Sylvia Plath. The love that made me feel intoxicated just from walking down a city street, craning my neck up the sky to watch concrete and glass pour into a never-ending sea of blue that I would have sipped right from a straw if I could have. California boys became the last places I looked for love, much to my nosy aunt’s chagrin.

Which was good because I never much cared for them anyway. Not not with their surfer hair or marijuana addictions or laid back, sun-bleached personalities. Liked, maybe. But it was murky, confusing, always leaving me in a state of being able to go either way. In, out, it didn’t much matter. I could have, I suppose, cared less. Real, romantic love was not something I was ever under any illusion of acquaintance with. The feeling I had for places and experiences was far more intoxicating.

My boyfriend at the time knew this when I sat him down on a park bench at this time last year to tell him it was over and all he could do was look at me and ask with a stain of equal parts jealousy and resignation, Why New York?

It seemed off topic in the moment. What?

THIS IS WHY

But sitting here now, exactly one year later, drinking coffee while looking out at the snow falling all over Brooklyn, I understand that I have a love for this corner of the world that I don’t ever have to question. It is not murky or confusing, it doesn’t fluctuate or disappear or change shape when I am not looking. It just grows. And every time I think it is done, every time I think it can’t get any bigger, any better, it does. Every day it does.

I was walking down the street the other day when I looked around me and got this feeling. This feeling that I can’t really put a finger on but know it is the best thing I have ever known. And I thought, Oh. Oh this is what it’s supposed to feel like. This is the texture of love.

My older brother used to call New York my “long distance lover”. The place I couldn’t stop thinking about and sneaking off to be with every chance I got. The love that stood like an elephant in the room to every relationship I got into, reminding people that my heart already had one foot on a plane.

I don’t know a lot. I don’t know most things. But I do know that love is not a one-dimensional experience reserved for romance. I know that adolescence would have been a hell of a lot easier if that wasn’t a concept I had to pry out of my brain with an ice-pick. If I knew that it is also a vast web that casts itself over your world when you’re where you’re supposed to be. I know that it is somehow both exhilarating and calming all at once and that it has a way of making you feel held by something you can’t ever see, but can feel.

I can’t think of a better valentine.

Happy day of love.

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