The first night I arrived in San Diego, I stood at the Torrey Pines Gliderport and felt as though I was on the edge of the world. Dizzying, unfamiliar expanse, swelling and monstrous on the edge of terrestrial life. A girl from an inland city knew nothing of coexisting with such a beast. If I ran too far, there would be no stop sign or safety net to catch me and haul me back to shore.
The first month I lived in San Diego, I couldn’t stop myself from taking a photo every time I caught a glimpse of the ocean. At what point do you get used to it? I asked someone who had lived here since birth. She responded: Honestly, I don’t remember the last time I was amazed by it.
Me, age 18, staring down from the precipice. The ocean, college, my twenties, the loss of my childhood, whatever that means. About to fall in.
Annie Dillard once wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” We are mosaics of people we’ve met, our writing is influenced by everything we’ve read, and our time on earth is nothing more than the compilation of every waking hour. Now I am 20 and sometimes I can’t remember where one waking hour ended and the next began. Maybe I need to start writing it all down. In a few short months, some of my friends will be graduating, and I can’t help but be terrified by the thought that another edge is fast-approaching.
Some days I make tea in the mornings, but I’m clumsy and spill a bit on the countertop while pouring it into the mug. If I was writing it all down I might write: Today I spilled tea on the counter. Good god, I can’t do anything with grace. And it’s true, I’m often tripping over nothing and spilling tea on the counter. But is “clumsiness” the theme I want to assign to this period of my life? How many of our memories do we write in ourselves, covering the margins with words because we cannot bear to leave them empty, conjuring up obscure themes in places they don’t exist?
In December I went to the beach for the first time in a while. I told my friend, When I first moved here, I felt like I was on the edge of the world. He said he used to feel the same way when he first moved to San Diego—apparently from the south end of the San Francisco Bay, you could always see the land on the other side waiting to catch you. I realized then that deep down we are all fumbling about and grasping at short-lived things; we are all standing up on wobbly rocks only to be pushed off once the tides shift, right as we find our footing.
Here’s what San Diego has taught me: sometimes the difference between one hour and the next is as subtle as a change in wind speed. You can’t get too frustrated by the routine of it all. The wind will pick up again soon, knocking you into strange new places. For now, I’m going to preserve a version of myself that fills her camera roll with various shots of the same horizon. To find beauty in familiar sights and familiar people, and laugh about spilled tea. To get lost in the details but eventually find my way out. To take comfort in the fact that we need each other, clumsy as we are, as we jump off the edge.
