You would think it would be when wiping snot from my face while trying not to slip on icy sidewalks.

You would think it would be when getting nearly knocked over by frigid winds blowing through the Upper West Side, sweating in over-heated coffee shops, or getting lost in the pouring rain.

But it wasn’t.

It was when the sun kissed my shoulders.

CLICK HERE TO SUPPORT A SMALL ARTIST WITH BIG DREAMS (ME)

SPRING IN CENTRAL PARK

It was when I pulled off my sweater in Central Park to miraculously sport a tank top in the middle of March that memories of California flooded my body. I felt the warm light on my skin, the cool breeze on my face, and sensed every ounce of the world I was from.

See, I am new to winter. Winter and I are still just getting on a first name basis. In the snow I am awkward and curious and clumsy like a child. When the wind howls, I still run to the window to hear every note of it’s cry. The process of layering, de-layering, and re-layering as you bounce from outside to inside is still an art I am just learning to master. All to say, for the past month, I have felt like an amateur. A beginner. The new kid in school who doesn’t know where the cafeteria is and is too proud to ask.

Not that I have minded, as you all know. But there was something about feeling that warm sun today, something about seeing the grass turn green overnight and the daffodils spring up under my feet, that made me think of home. Which, in turn, made me feel like myself. The self I embodied in California. The self who wore tank tops on long city walks instead of full-length wool coats. The one who knew the streets like the back of her hand and made fun of bumbling tourists as they stared in awe at the place that was the mere backdrop of every memory she had.

I left all of that in California, choosing to embrace the awkwardness and uncertainty of a new world that I knew would challenge me. Everyday, it challenges me. Which, is both exhilarating and exhausting all at once. So to walk through the first warm day today—to feel air that felt just like the air I have spend my whole life breathing—it was like being surrounded by home.

THE LOVE YOU GET TO KEEP

I used to write a lot about this, before the blog, back when I moved out for college. I distinctly remember how potent and important my childhood became to me once I separated myself from it. Up until that point, I had always brushed it off when psychologists preached about the long term mold that your coming of age presses you into. Everything in the world seemed to revolve around whether or not you had a good childhood and something about that seemed tragic and too out of one’s current control for me.

But then I left home and I understood it all at once. I understood that the love my family poured into me from the moment I first tasted this world was love that I got to keep. I started to notice random things and experience mundane tasks in a nostalgic light. Chopping onions for dinner and hearing them hit the hot cast iron pan made me feel just like my mother. Listening to Nora Jones while I washed the dishes and Coltrane as I folded clothes, putting fresh flowers in the windowsill and vacuuming the carpet, they all became motions of home that I had not realized I had internalized. I had not realized that by growing up in a loving home, I had learned how to create one.

And then, it extended beyond the domestic space and out into the world. Walking through parks and across beaches, I would be comforted by swarms of swirling memories that would reach out and grab my hand. And it was then, in those moments of being alone in the world, yet so far from it, that I realized that our perceptions of each day are like paintings that our memories each hold a brush against. Our past experiences are forever coming in and coloring the present.

I think we tend to focus on the haunting aspect of that. But that first year in college, all I could see was the good. Suddenly my angsty-teenage perspectives and heady inclinations to flee from home turned into this overwhelming sense of gratitude for the box of colors that my childhood gave me to paint the world with.

SEEING IN COLOR

Which brings me back to today.

I opened my eyes and saw the world in color. The man playing the saxophone to my left reminded me of Sunday afternoons, when my mother would open the windows and put a pot of sauce on to cook for hours. The flowers springing up reminded me of my grandmother and how she always told me that spring was marvelous in New York, her favorite time of the year to visit, and I would dream of the day that I would. And straight ahead, on top of the massive rock boulders, I saw myself as a child with my older brother, standing in our coats as my parents snapped photos before he would inevitably push me off of it. And so I was surrounded by love, even when technically three-thousand miles from it.

You don’t really understand it until you leave and are utterly alone in some foreign corner of the world, how love follows you. Just like trauma, just like pain, love comes too.

When people ask me how I knew I could move to New York alone, I don’t really have an answer other than that. Other than that I knew love would find me like the sun did today, and that I would find myself within in.

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)