It’s 8 p.m. and the sun is just going down.

I am in the back of a car on my way into Manhattan. I rarely take a car over the subway, but each time I do, it feels worth every penny just to get to feel all of this.

The city has a way of swallowing you into it. But there is always a moment before total encapsulation, just right before you become a part of it, where you can see the entirety of the metropolis. It’s a moment of peace akin to being underwater. In slow motion, you careen around the bend of the highway as the East Side flashes you with her bright lights and endless sheets of concrete and glass. You are suspended, stunned, yet still separate from it all.

The second you enter it, your head breaks through the water’s surface, and chaos ensues. Sweet, psychotic, entirely unbearable, yet impossible to leave, chaos.

As I revel in that strange moment of submerged peace in the back of that car, it occurs to me that I will not forget these nights. When you are fifteen, you think you will be fifteen forever. There is an innocence afforded to you that you only get just the once. Maybe that is why the withdrawal from those years is so slow and saturated with grief. You lose something you didn’t know you had.

Fifteen, sixteen—any of those years—could have been, and they were for me, abysmally hellish, but it would not matter.

All that would matter was the abrupt and total erasure of them. A dissolution of life as it had always been, a senseless shove into full-blown adulthood—whatever kind of melodramatic spin you put on it, there was simply no escaping the fact that for the first time in your life, you wished for time to slow down.

Ironically, as these things go, time was only just beginning to speed up.

Now in my twenties, I have this beautiful yet cutting kind of awareness of the whole thing. I am both in love with and in mourning for each moment, knowing so truly that it is already giving way to the next. It seems a young age to be grappling with aging and the passage of time and all the big, existential questions of life, but I do feel the weight of it. It only takes meeting one person to show you how simply not nearly long enough this life is and how absolutely horrifying of a concept death seems.

I am afraid of wanting more time than I have. More time with this earth and with this person. You don’t really think about that when you are very young. Death did not scare me then. I had the understandable audacity to be miserable as a teenager. I didn’t yet know that everything good and worth waiting for was on the other side of 17.

Like spring in New York City. Like sitting here by the open window, watching the freshly bloomed London plane trees dance through the streets of Brooklyn.

I won’t pretend to have anything profound to say about the explosion of spring that has not already been said. So I will just say that it is beautiful. More so than you ever thought the world could be, even when you were sixteen, watching the sun melt like cherry lava over the Pacific. Sometimes I have to remind myself that I used to be there. That, as much as it often feels like it, I have not, in fact, always been here.

Here, running out for ice cream on the first warm night of April. Here, where strawberry and tangerine tulips bloom under my feet, as the entire city breaks the silence of winter with one warm shriek of excitement.

You forget how warm the sun can be when she feels like it. You forget how warm you can be, too.

One moment you are sipping red wine on a sunken couch at someone’s Christmas party in Brooklyn, plotting and scheming how to get home with all fingers and toes, and the next you are spotting June dancing on the horizon with her sun-kissed shoulders and freckled nose.

Summer is an outstretched hand, an open invitation. Come and see what you will find.

I “found” Tod’s Point for the first time a few weeks back—a running fantasy of mine for reasons I’ll never be able to pin down. The waves lapped at the shore in such a steady, gentle succession that I felt the need to be still in their presence. The California beaches of my childhood were always these intimidating, violent, all-consuming things. They would suck you in and grind your bones to sand. You learned to respect and love them for that.

But this.

This little stretch of beach was so serene. My boyfriend pointed to the place on the shore where he worked as a teenager, and all I could think was that all this time he was here and I was there, waiting to come and find the calm to my chaos.