I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening. (Christian Wilman)

If I am to put this past year into one line, it would be that.

I am drowning in love but I was not always. Or, I was rather, but not the kind that you hold enough gratitude for until much later on when you find out that not everyone grew up like you did. You are so much more focused on lack than on abundance when you are that young.

And I was that young.

FATE

I was a teenager, floating on my back in that swimming pool and love was a dissolution. It was an ending, a thing always running out. I was so young but it didn’t feel like it. I was so young and I was staring into that big blue sky, dreaming of a love as endless as it. One that would just keep opening.

At the end of last year, I wrote about how what you love is your fate. I was sitting in California, reflecting on the year while peering into the next, and all I could think about was fate. I had just gotten my apartment in New York. I was going and I felt nothing if not an insane lack of fear. I had no job lined up, knew absolutely no one, and had only ever seen photos of my apartment. But I just had this feeling of knowing. This undeniable, unwavering surety. I knew that I needed to go.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t expect chaos. I expected to be lethally homesick for starters. I went to college ten minutes from where I grew up and had only ever been away for maybe two weeks at a time. I was also moving in the dead of winter, a season I would be meeting for the first time in my life. Not to mention the lack of a job, friends, or family. It made no sense at all, but none of it scared me.

I remember how I got off of that plane, looked around, and felt the strangest, surest sensation of belonging. The bare, skeletal trees, the fire escapes and Brownstones and street murals. I still remember the pale, winter light that shone on my face as I drove through Brooklyn and how hollow any other version of my life immediately became.

A TRIP THROUGH TIME

That was almost one year ago now, a fact of time that feels entirely unreal. For when I think of all the months since then, it all feels like a dream, a trip through time, a stumble and a fall into the very life I wanted more than anything. In reflecting on it all now, certain things become so clear.

Like how that fear of homesickness never did come to fruition, not even for a moment. The entire concept of home has instead since become a beautifully branching dichotomy. I never knew it could do that.

Or how expansive of a feeling love has become. I am only ever falling more into it. It is only ever revealing it’s expanding walls to me. I am starting to think that there are no walls. Love might be the universe itself. It might be a thing unending—a concept so illogical and foreign to the human brain that it took us forever to actually believe it. It took me forever to actually believe it.

But I believe it.

When I look back on this year, I see nothing but love stacked up upon itself, reaching into the sky. Rationally, I know there have also been ugly, depletive, painful, demoralizing things. I know that I have not been carelessly frolicking through a meadow for twelve months. I mean, Jesus. But it does sometimes feel like it.

I close my eyes and see myself running through SoHo and Greenpoint and the Upper West Side on solo adventures, finding new coffee shops and art galleries and god knows what else. I see myself hauling that beautifully ugly painting that everyone hate but me from a vintage thrift shop all the way home on foot. It’s a conversation piece. I see endless avenues and long walks and making coffee every morning in the apartment I still cannot believe is mine. And then, somewhere in the hot haze of summer, I see myself beginning to make coffee for two. I am running around Manhattan, eating sushi in underground restaurants and dashing home in the rain with someone who makes life feel a way it never has. I see myself sitting in a speakeasy, feeling every stupid, cheesy, lame cliché about love at first sight become so embarrassingly true. I am sipping my drink, listening to him tell some story, and trying to make sense of how quickly any version of a life without him was already dissolving from desire.

That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to go on yet another comically terrible date that I could come back here and tell all of you about like I was always doing.

Instead, the world began to spin and I have not been able to find the right words to explain it to you since. I ask you to forgive me for that. I am still dissecting it, still trying to make sense of how you can be an independent introvert for all of your life, never more content than when running through the city alone, only to meet someone one random day who makes you want to share the whole thing. Every second of it.

And that changes you. It changes you as a person and it changes you as a writer. I am coming to understand this.

GAINING PERSPECTIVE

Yet, there are certain things that you can only come to understand once you gain perspective.

Actually, I would say most things are like that. You can’t make sense of the painting if your nose is still touching it. You have to step back, and back, and back, and then tilt your head a little and maybe squint for good measure and only then, maybe, can you piece together some kind of profound explanation. The kind my college professors used to beg us to take a chance on during discussions. Be bold! Be intellectually reckless! Surely the lengthy description of the redness of the door was not just for fun! One poor soul would of course have to argue that it very well might have been just for fun, an event you can count on in any English class, to which the professor would visibly, tragically, fall back down to the ground that they had been practically levitating off of for the past hour.

But anyway. The point is, or was rather, that I only came to understand my relationship to California when I moved across the country from it. My life in California ended and my life in New York began. Or, so I thought. For as I came to realize, and as a reader has pointed out, I will carry California with me forever. I just will.

INSPIRED BY A READER’s COMMENT: ONE LESSON

Speaking of, and quite serendipitously as I am writing this on the plane back to New York after visiting California for the past week, I received a comment on an old post asking me this: What’s one lesson or memory from California that you’ll carry with you forever?

In this memory, I am a child, standing on the shoreline of the Pacific.

My toes are wriggling into the thick, muddy sand, relishing the squishy delight, when I get told to watch out. To look up. Never turn your back on the ocean. My mother taught me the land and my father taught me the sea. She stuck my hands into vegetable gardens and made me her designated sous-chef. But my father, he took me to the beach and taught me the ocean. First, to never turn your back to it. I learned respect and reverence. Tourists would get pummeled in the waves and sucked out to sea, ruining another one of the lifeguard’s lunch breaks, and I we would roll our eyes. We knew how to read the current.

The lesson was two-fold, though. It was not enough to simply stand on the shore and know when to back up. I had to learn the waves themselves. My dad took me out into the sea, right into the face of the towering waves, and told me to dive under them. I was terrified. The logical thing was to flee from the wave. To go with the wave. To do anything at all really except the one thing that I was being told to. But I had been sucked under and tossed around and nearly choked to death by saltwater enough times to know that my way wasn’t working. I closed my eyes and torpedoed my arms in front of me, diving into the underbelly of the mounting wave. And then, seamlessly, I emerged unscathed on the other side of it. I looked around and saw nothing but still, calm waters, covered in glistening drops of sun. My dad smiled and I felt like I unlocked the secret to the sea.

I didn’t know it yet, but I also unlocked the secret to life.

I learned how to not fear it. I learned that there are so many moments where everything will feel bigger than you. You will be that child, farther out into the sea than you can stand, watching all of this water amount before you with no clear way out. It will feel insurmountable. You will feel lost, terrified, and alone. But you can learn to look at the waves, at the enormous, unpredictable things before you, and know that there is a way out. But the only way out is through.

We cause a lot of our own pain by trying all other ways. We try to stand our ground and the wave knocks us over and pummels us into the sand. We try to over it and the current sucks us under, shooting water so far up our noses we are convinced we will never find air again. And we can, of course, always try to run. To make it back to shore, heaving and panting. And sometimes, this works. But then, you’re on shore. You are building ephemeral sandcastles, thinking you are alive, but you are not alive. You are not living. You are not facing anything.

And so, to answer the question, one lesson from California that I will carry with me forever is to face everything. To push yourself out past where your feet can touch and accept whatever challenge this entity that is so much bigger than you presents you with. Because it is, so much bigger than you. You cannot turn your back on it. You cannot go around it. You have to look right up at the thing that scares you more than anything and dive headfirst into it.

I think I did that this year. As December dissolves into January, and January back into December, I can’t think of a better resolution than to keep practicing.

Happy New Year.

Love, m.

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