When I think of it now, years later, I imagine I am in a room, getting questioned by some detective who is just trying to piece together a coherent story for the record.

Except I am both the detective and the witness, the one squinting at the evidence, and the one staring at it with a hollowed out gaze. Everything that follows is the conversation that transpires between the two. 

So start with that night. Walk me through it. 

OCTOBER NIGHTS IN OCEAN BEACH

There was nothing special about it, nothing out of the ordinary that could have hinted at it’s fate. If there had been something, anything, I like to think that we would have held on for a moment longer, snapped another photo, marveled at the distance that our innocence afforded our feet from the ground. But we didn’t. We didn’t know what the ground was that night.

We were at some party at a beach house on the cliffs, breathing in the familiar marriage of ocean air and distant marijuana. Someone had strung tiny lights from the trees and there was a band of teenage boys strumming on a makeshift stage. People floated around in the way that they do when they are too stoned to know their own names, blowing bubbles like they were at Woodstock and not Sarah’s mom’s backyard. 

It was the kind of thing that was fun for about an hour and then you just had to get out, away from the pink haired palm readers and Dave Grohl wannabes and that one random guy who you are pretty sure graduated last year but still comes to the kickbacks, milking something that has long since evaporated.

So we left, piling into Gemma’s car—a vintage, forest green Mercedes that was easily the pride and joy of our friend group. Passed down to her from her father and in near-death shape, we should not have been driving it and we loved it all the more for that. We loved that the doors had to be manually unlocked and that the seats were covered in sheepskin that threatened to consume your body each time you sunk into it. We loved that it only played CDs and that it never failed to garner looks of shock on old men’s faces at stoplights when they discovered that the owner of such a classic was a teenage girl.

Tell me about her. Tell me so I don’t forget.

THE GHOSTS OF PAST LIVES

Gemma was brilliant but she was perpetually haunted by the sense that people assumed her otherwise due to her petite, girlish, blonde appearance. She liked classic rock and NPR and could talk circles around the debate team when it came to foreign policy, women’s rights, and environmental degradation. She liked flat whites and bell bottoms, quinoa salad and the Beatles. She once got grounded for a month because her mom found our batch of home brewed sangria in her closet, an occurrence that still makes me laugh.

We had known each other since middle school, but only came to be friends upon entering the labyrinthian years of high school. I think we initially clung onto each other for survival more than anything, but she quickly became my favorite human. 

And the others?

Kyla was new. The opposite of me, she was practical, logical, good at math, and terrible at expressing her emotions.I don’t truly remember where she came from, only that one day she was simply there and we all fell in love with her. She was plucked directly from the 90s and dropped into our lives as a sarcastic, maternal guide with an endless collection of rock band T-shirts—all of which, and this mattered—she genuinely knew everything about. She had gone to a sketchy middle school that gave her a premature taste of all things perverse and because of this, she was the one who would tell us to drink water and get home at a reasonable hour as if she were forty and not a junior in high school.

She said she knew things. I am not sure if she did. I am not sure if she ever really did do cocaine in the eighth grade or sleep with a drummer backstage in LA one night, but the mere possibility of these things was exciting enough for us. 

And then, there was Martha.

Martha had bunny scratches on her wrists and a bottle of antidepressants on her nightstand, but you would never know this. She had flaming red hair, an infectious laugh, and the endearing, when not infuriating, inability to keep a secret. Her hands always had acrylic paint on them and even though she would never admit it, her artwork was stunning. She was the first person I knew who had smoked a joint and when we first met at newly fifteen, I remember thinking that was scandalous.

She lived in a charming blue house a few blocks from the beach and I used to walk there after school and eat dried mango with her at the kitchen table. The walls were sky blue and seashells collected in a bowl on the counter. We would often take the bikes out, riding down to the beach or the farmer’s market, eating burritos while watching the sun drip out of the sky and into the ocean, staining the world in shades of cherry red and candy orange. 

It was her house that we congregated at, hung out in, slept in, and smuggled illicit beverages into. It’s funny, looking back, the absolute fervency with which we desired drunkenness. It was sort of like anything back then in that it offered the promise of immense fun at a steep cost. And the thing about being fifteen, sixteen, is that you have yet to be formally introduced to such costs, and just how precisely you will have to pay for them. 

COASTAL FEVER DREAMS

But this was then.

This was then. This was girlhood. This was standing barefoot in the kitchen, feeling vodka burn your throat for the first time because Martha’s older sister couldn’t believe you had never tasted it. This was sitting cross legged on bedroom floors, passing bottles like secrets, bottles that someone got from someone else and you just didn’t care where. It was always something vile that no one would miss—cooking brandy or peppermint schnapps. There was a week where minty toothpaste nauseated us all.

This was running barefoot and bare hearted through the pitch-black streets of Ocean Beach with long, saltwater hair trailing down our backs, laughing. We were always laughing, especially in that house. The windows were perpetually open, letting in a constant stream of ocean breeze, and I loved it for that. I loved that the wood floors were always a little bit warm and that if you sat on the stairs, you could stare right out at the Pacific. I could have stayed there forever, elbows resting on my knees with salt in my hair and the faint smell of acrylic paint wafting over from Martha’s room. I would have given anything to return there one last time.

If you had told me on that night, that night of the party on the cliffs, that I never would, I would have jumped out of the car and run right to it. I would have walked through that door one last time and sat on those sunken stairs and said something, anything, of a goodbye. I would have wanted that.

But all I could hear was the deafening sound of David Bowie blasting from Gemma’s failing stereo as we careened down the coast of California. I remember holding my hand out of the window, feeling the immense pressure of the air. I remember the jet black abyss that the water mirrored at that hour. And I remember the stories. The stories reported by the local news about all the people who died on that very road. People who fell off the cliffs while taking selfies or driving a little too haphazardly, a little too close to the edge. Like kids around a campfire, they were our beach town ghost tales. We told them for a scare, a chill, back when loss was still a stranger to our lives that we would invite in for fun.

THE ENDS OF THINGS

We drove forever that night. To this day, I can still hear Gemma singing along to Pink Floyd and Nirvana as the waves lapped against the shore. It was the last time I can remember ever hearing it. 

For, while we would all return home safely that night, we were about to suffer our own fall, one so jarring that we would lose each other mid-air.

Of what came next, this much I know:

Martha’s parents sold the house and hauled her off to Illinois. She told us one day on the boardwalk and I remember it feeling like the end of something that we all knew was bigger than just a place. It was the first crack, the first sign of demolition, a fissure from which we knew we would not recover. And we were right.

As junior year came to close, she was on a plane out of our lives.

And then?

ALPHABET SOUP

I don’t remember much of what happened next.

Everything stopped. We drifted apart.

Life pulled us in different directions.

College loomed, and soon, we were scattered across the country. Our adolescence dissolved in the palms of our hands and it took those reckless nights and endless bouts of laughter with it. We were baby-faced teenagers one moment and young adults the very next. There was a pandemic, university, and then, the real world.

The one I am in now.

The one where I have no interest in vodka anymore and I can’t remember the last time I listened to a CD. We are all god knows where now, beginning our own lives. We are meeting new people, people who we tell the stories of those days to on balmy summer nights when the sky looks almost like it did back then. When the golden light falls onto our skin in such a way that we just cannot help it. We can’t not remember.

I am fifteen again, eating dried mango at my best friend’s kitchen table. And then I blink and I am not. I am someplace else, someplace better, growing dizzier each minute that I spend staring at the distance that has stretched between us. I can still see glimpses of that girl, standing barefoot in Martha’s kitchen, just as I can still sometimes hear the waves crashing on that shore. They stop being moments you want to return to, but they never leave you.

For there is nothing coherent or linear about coming of age. The memories shift and swirl in my mind like letters in alphabet soup. Every time I look, I see something new, something I did not see then, but was right there all the same.

I close the case. I stand up. I turn off the light and leave the interrogation room.

And it’s enough.

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