A Return

The flight attendant announces that we’ve landed in San Diego. “If it’s too cold for anyone, there’s a red eye back to New York,” he adds. Soft laughter fills the cabin, or at least that’s how I like to imagine it in my memory — a collective sigh of relief shared between those escaping a  record summer heat wave in the city. 

As I wait on the curb for my mom and her boyfriend to pick me up from the airport, I take notice of the coolness of the air and the way passerbys greet each other with open arms without minding me. This feeling of invisibility is a welcome break from the gaze and comments, well-intentioned or otherwise, from strangers back in the city. It’s always surprising to me how foreign some place can feel again, no matter how familiar it once was. 

It’s been a year since I’ve moved out of southern California, though I don’t remember this until a work email pops up in my inbox informing me of my one-year work anniversary a few days into my trip back home to San Diego. It seems insignificantly significant — a metaphorical mile marker of all that has passed. The email features multi-colored balloons and a brief generic message celebrating my time at the company and is accompanied by a quick follow-up reminding me to update my emergency contacts. It seems poetic to have come back home exactly one year since I left, though I do tend to say this about most things, ascribing meaning to random collections of life’s moments because it makes me happy. 

While I’m home, I make an effort to go to the beach as many times as possible. Early on a Tuesday morning before my first meeting of the day, my mom and I drive to Bird Rock. We spend most of our time sipping coffee at an overlook point during the hour before my favorite bakery is open. Even though it’s been years since I first came here, this spot feels the same — the house that frames the view of the ocean, the random car or truck that’s perpetually parked on the curb, the group of experienced surfers cruising along the waves barreling towards the cliffs. When I’m here, I feel frozen in time, if only for a moment. In a universe tending towards entropy, I am traveling backwards.

I am drawn to places I’ve been before for this reason. I seek not only comfort, familiarity and pause amidst the chaos of life, but also access to a physical manifestation of my memories and the person I used to be. When I press my hands into the metal railing, I can’t help but remember all the previous times I had done this. I came here often when I was alone during one of the last quarters before I graduated college, contemplating what it meant to seek fulfillment from what one does and the unexpected psychological freedoms that accompany solitude. I also came here when I was just beginning to really fall in love again when I had previously convinced myself I wouldn’t until I was in my late twenties. Each time I left and came back, these ephemeral feelings and thoughts became etched deeper into this spot. 

Through distance, whether from some time, place, or person, change becomes increasingly detectable. Year after year, one of my best friends from high school and I will trace back through friends we’ve reconnected with or lost touch with, laugh at our moments of intense obsessions, and reminisce on the ways in which life was somehow easier and harder back then. We speak of how unfathomable our current existence is, and how the versions of ourselves anchored in our pasts could not have even slightly predicted where we would be now. We talk of the future too, wistfully imagining what the upcoming year will bring us and making hypotheses that we know most likely will be disproven. We say our ephemeral desires out loud as though they are prayers to some sort of religion confined in this ritual we share. 

On the beach, my mom takes photos of me. Coming home is one of the rare times I collect so many images of myself. She snaps a picture of me sitting on the sand, of me boogie boarding alongside small children, of me jumping in the waves. We take photos with each other with our overlapping floppy sun hats and wave our hands in frame to trigger the phone’s self-timer. I think about how in a few months and then again in a few years we’ll look back at these photos, reminiscing about this time in our lives, not knowing what was to come each time. We do this already with the photo memories that pop up on our phones of trips to farmers markets, family vacations, and haircut appointments, and with the photos that line the hallways of my childhood home.

I can’t pinpoint when exactly I began to vocalize my wants better or when I started to separate anxious thoughts from facts, but when I see the picture taken a little over a year ago of a girl smiling in a grad dress on my childhood bedroom table, I know that the two of us are different in this way. So when I look at the girl on my mom’s phone trying desperately to not squint into the sun, I wonder momentarily how we too will begin to grow apart.

Time moves differently here on this coast. I’d describe it as slower but that description feels wholly inadequate. If seconds in the city were progressions of rapid, distinctive staccato notes, seconds in San Diego were soft, low thrums, the resonance of each second carrying into the next. 

In the year I was away, I had adjusted to the rhythm of the city, making plans stacked one after the other in an effort to keep up with the pace of my new environment. But in San Diego, my body and mind ease back to what they know, no longer feeling the need to keep up with some intangible paragon of productivity and spending evenings steeped in a desire to simply be outdoors.

I close my eyes as I listen to the waves returning to the shore again and again, the tide drawing closer each time. In a few days, I will leave the place I am from to return to the city. Inevitably I will come back again.