I was on the phone with my parents the other day when my dad tried to tell me what a beautiful day they were having in San Diego.

I laughed.

Laughed because every day is beautiful in San Diego. I guess they had a little rain and it was quite traumatic. But here, here where the first warm days are slowly appearing for a city that has been in actual winter for months, that phrase takes on a whole new meaning. People lose their minds, stripping down to tank tops and packing themselves like sardines into any patch of green grass available. Every park looks like Coachella. Every person’s body liberated at last from the chains of puffer coats and beanies, red noses and purple hands.

Infected by the allure of spring, I randomly set out the other day just to be outside and ended up in Greenwich. But the thing about coming out of winter, I am realizing, is that your temperature gage is thrown all out of balance. Suddenly a mere seventy-five degrees feels like the inferno of hell. I stopped for an iced coffee at some cafe, getting in line behind a group of cubicle workers clearly on their lunch break. The thing you realize as you get older is that people don’t really grow up. The dynamics of high school don’t stay in high school. These professionals were spewing office gossip like they were on Bravo TV, slashing names and spilling drama for my own personal entertainment. Horrifying, hilarious stuff.

I was snapped out of it when a perky barista asked for my order and I watched, amazed, as she took four or five more orders after mine without writing anything down. She just nodded and smiled, like some coffee robot getting started on the entire line’s orders before they even got to the register. I’m still not used to the efficiency of this city. There are so many people at any given time that crowd control is practically built into every place you enter. I remember how odd it seemed the first time I went to a grocery store and there was a person standing on a stool, shouting numbers for the first available checkout counter. Four on the left, seven on the right, directing us like pinballs.

Anyway, I sat down with my coffee and pulled out my journal, laughing as I looked around and saw that I wasn’t alone. I’m still not used to that either. In San Diego, I was always the only one with pen and paper in coffee shops, everyone else always sucked into a laptop. I would even get comments about it, usually elderly people who were just happy to see that handwriting hasn’t died out. But here, you’re just a sucker to conformity when you pull out your Moleskine.

I left the cafe and wandered into Washington Square Park. One of the first truly warm days, the place was a circus. I took my earbuds out, turning off my own jazz music to find a real, live jazz band performing. NYU students were reading on every bench as twenty-something guys played spikeball on the grass. I sat down with my own book and felt like one of them, imagining for a moment what it would have been like to go to school here. Here where kids probably share books and ideas in the way that the kids at my school shared red solo cups and Mono. Professors with elbow patches and furrowed brows strolled by as herds of student protestors shouted in the distance over any given political debate. It was like a parody of itself. A skit of what you imagine a college scene in the village to be like.

I thought of phantom lives while sitting on that bench. Of what my college experience might have been like if I had gone here. I have long since come to peace with my college years. I loved them entirely and wouldn’t change anything. The butterfly effect and whatnot. But sitting there, I thought for a moment of what it might have been like anyway. A spooky, phantom life, that kind of thing sneaks up on you like a draft on the back of your neck, sending chills down your spine as it taunts you with what never was, but might have been. Cheryl Strayed calls those lives the ghost ships that didn’t carry us.

College in New York was a ghost ship that did not carry me. I have known that for years. But what’s new, what has thrown me recently, is the sudden peace I feel over that. I spent a long time feeling out of place at my university, loving my classes, but always feeling that there was some place else for me. I was haunted by the palm trees and eternal sunshine. By the hungover student body and the ungodly sea of toes that is any given sidewalk in San Diego. But it was also perfect. It just was. Perfect in the kind of way that I now just feel grateful to have experienced.

Even sitting in that park, even surrounded by student jazz bands and boys with books, I felt that gratitude all the same.

It warmed my skin like the sun, imperceptibly. This was a ghost ship that didn’t carry me, but thank god.

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