October, two years ago.

I was walking down that dank hallway I loved so dearly, with 17 books and 3 essays in hand, feeling the weight of time slipping through my fingers.

I knew, with a kind of aching certainty, that I would never be there again.

And while I dreamed of that in many ways, dreamed of graduating from college and moving to New York, dreamed of a world radically foreign and unknown to me, I remember a distinct and cutting desire to pause time.

To crawl inside that moment and preserve it like amber. To collect every avocado sandwich and iced coffee and blueberry smoothie and first date and life-changing lecture and skateboard route and press them all into something thicker and more tangible than memory.

I knew I’d never be that exact version of myself ever again.

The one who believed that art could save her and the whole world, back when loving it that much made you interesting instead of unserious. Who lived mostly in the margins—of books, of friend groups, of magazine deadlines—but felt at the very center of the world.

I knew that the fantasy land of college was a thing going away, and that sooner or later, I was bound to let go of the dreams I conjured up like playful potions in my adolescence and reunite with the ones I carried like daisies in the palm of my hand as a child.

When I moved to New York, I was stepping into the life I’d been spelling out in journals and tracing the outlines of in countless books. I packed my bags with expectations—lofty, glittering ones. And I found those. They are even more lofty and glittering than I thought.

But I also found the quiet: echoing subways at dawn, street lamps flickering, corners of museums where no one asks what you want to be when you grow up.

They say growing up is partly a reunion with your inner child, and lately, I believe that.

At 23, I find myself identifying more with the little girl I was than the turbulent teenager who thought the world would end before she ever had to file taxes or fall in love or rent an apartment. At 17, I was so convinced that life would not go on, so sure that something would swallow me whole before I got a real chance at it.

And in a way, I was completely right. A version of me vanished in the space between long essays and late nights, between leaving home and landing in a new city. What I didn’t realize at the time—couldn’t realize—was that life doesn’t just end.

It insists.

It ends and it begins again. It was this tenacity that I failed to consider.

Now, all these years later, I’m wandering through the Met on a Saturday afternoon with the love of my life, surrounded by beauty, mystery, and soft light. And nothing feels as sharp or unbearable as it once did. I am softer now. Calmer, maybe. But more alive than I ever imagined being at 17.

Maybe it’s not that those wicked potion pipe dreams died, per se. Maybe it’s just that they grew into something larger, less selfish, more beautiful.

At some point, they stopped being all about me, and I stopped wanting them to be.

At any rate, it’s fall in NYC. The true promised land for a California kid.

Enjoy some photos of life as of late.