When we were kids, my cousin Lucas liked to build stuff. A computer, once, I think, and definitely a 3D printer. His house was filled with all these gadgets that seemed like they had been beamed straight out of a sci-fi movie. He was three years older than me and the coolest person I knew. My younger brothers and I idolized him—to us, he embodied a technological sophistication we could only aspire to. We were all vying to see the owl he 3D-printed, to try out his acoustic guitar, to hear the antique record player he was fixing up. He introduced us to the concept of tiny houses and the software used to design them, the “I Like To Make Stuff” YouTube channel, GarageBand. He built skateboards.

The first Christmas after we moved to the Bay Area, he gifted the three of us longboard-building kits. Lucas brought his own board all the way from L.A., too. That afternoon, he helped us put together the wheels and the axles and finally the decorative stickers. We all headed outside to test them out. 

We had just changed school districts on account of the move. Situated at the bottom of a large hill, Reed Elementary, servicing grades K-2, was just across the street from our new house. Jackson and I were both too old to attend, but we caught the bus from there each morning, and enjoyed the rest of what Reed had to offer—the playground after hours, the baseball fields, the long sloping driveway where parents would drop their kids off in the morning. It was steep enough to make for a great skateboarding ramp, so the four of us donned gloves and kneepads, climbed to the top, and sailed down. 

Maybe I shouldn’t say the four of us. Lucas rode fearlessly, but that’s a given. He was familiar with the board by that point. Not a fair comparison. But both Jackson and Cole, two and five years younger than me, respectively, also mustered the courage to make it all the way down. I managed to hike to the top just fine, stood up on my longboard okay, and then bailed seconds into the ride every time—put my protected hands onto the asphalt to slow the board to a crawl or a complete stop before reaching the bottom. 

It wasn’t falling that frightened me. I knew I was geared up enough to be able to walk off any tumble. It was something about the inertia. I have always been scared of going too fast. 

***

The summer between graduating high school and taking a gap year, I entered a quintessentially brief and yet soul-crushing relationship at that precipice before adulthood—that fateful interlude of a summer. 

I used to say all of my firsts belonged to Sophia, as well as several of my lasts. She’d been my best friend senior year (though I wasn’t hers), and our short-lived relationship ended, perhaps predictably, in disaster. Your classic anxious-avoidant duo, her coldness and seeming indifference to my feelings, met with my self-centered anxious spirals, my almost psychotic need for attention. 

My heart has never been patient, has always had that thrill-seeking attitude that afflicts theme park aficionados, bungee-jumpers, and adrenaline junkies. I fall fast and hard, arms flailing like a skydiver without a parachute, hurtling towards an end on hard cement. 

The faster you fall in love, the faster you get your heart broken. 

Every one of my exes would attest to the fact that I get attached too quickly. I would like to say that in the end, she fell out of love with me, and I followed her lead. But this is nonfiction; instead, I must admit that at the end of that summer, she took her “I love you” back and replaced it with, “I never meant it in the first place.” 

Apparently, I met her when I was ten, my first fall in the Bay Area. We were on the same rec soccer team. Her dad was the assistant coach. I still have the team photo. We kneel on the patchy grass field of our elementary school, matching red uniforms, smiling. Her on the end of the front row, me closer to the middle. I still had those narrow purple glasses and bangs. Sophia’s hair was lighter and longer. That must have been the year her parents divorced. She later told me her mom took her to therapy to look better in front of the family court and then took her out of it when the therapist said her diagnoses were largely her mother’s fault. 

I don’t remember meeting her until a year later, in middle school. Actually, I don’t remember meeting her at all. She sort of just appeared one day, became a background fixture, and then a very prominent character in my life for eight years. And then she disappeared from it completely. 

But before that, she was my first kiss, my first date, my first heartbreak. My last homecoming, my last prom, my last day of high school. The morning after graduation, our senior class gathered at Battery Spencer to watch the sun rise over the Golden Gate Bridge. The two of us stood there together, surrounded by everyone we’d spent the last four years with, Mike’s Hard Lemonades in the night and bagels in the morning, first-ever drunken confessions, first-ever drunken anythings, the beginning of something that would hurt more than I realized. And I remember thinking about that night that stretched into morning, that my life was finally starting. I still think I was right. 

***

At some point later that summer, my dad decided it was necessary that I take a “driving safety” course. This, I recognized despite my protests, was not an unreasonable ask given how nice my parents had been to me when I’d crashed their new blue Subaru into a parking garage in Berkeley. 

He made me wake up at five in the morning two days in a row to drive two hours south, all the way down to Salinas. “Driving safety,” my ass. I spent the whole time learning how to do donuts, how to drift, how to drive stick in a Mustang racecar, and the basics of autocross on a professional racetrack. Every time my stomach flipped, I pictured the car doing the same thing. I hated it—hated being yelled at to go faster around those small orange cones, tight turns.

I never drove when I was with Sophia. She took us around in her black Honda Civic. We went back to that sunrise spot in the Headlands a lot, though usually for the sunset, and then stayed until the stars followed.  

Once, driving back across the bridge, she mentioned that her father didn’t have a license. Or, rather, he’d had one, and it had been taken away. Which hadn’t stopped him from driving to work every morning with a mug of red wine in the cupholder. When we were both in middle school, he crashed the car and was arrested in front of her. He was let off because the cops who did it messed up the procedure. A technicality and a good lawyer. 

I don’t talk to Sophia anymore. Last I did, she was heading off to UCLA to become a chemical engineer. She was a perfect student in high school. Effortless 4.0. Bragged about how little she had to work for her grades, how much she did work in the real world. She logged about 40 hours a week as a barista at Starbucks. The 4 a.m. shifts were her favorite. 

I tried and failed to reconnect with her later that fall. A girl I knew at the time told me that maybe it was meant to be a gradual thing. But I wanted all of her back all at once. “Maybe it’ll happen on a slower timeline. Maybe you’ll get coffee one day, two years from now.” I couldn’t imagine it. Two years was an impossible length of time. 

I think that conversation happened three years ago. 

***

I claim to enjoy running, but I hate it.

This is every runner’s open secret. You simply have to love it too, an overpowering love that drowns out the constant injuries, the days when everything is difficult and slower than it should be, the hill training, the heat training, the sweat dripping down your forehead and stinging your eyes, the pounding of your heart that tells you you’re so tired.

I claim to be afraid of going too fast, and yet I dedicate a substantial amount of my time to a hobby in which the primary objective is to move as fast as possible. 

Is that the primary objective? 

Or is it, maybe, health: the idea that by investing some time in the present, you could prolong your time in the future? Is it chatting with your mother, learning more details about what she was like when she was your age, what you were like when you were a different age, how much the world has changed in the last three or four years?

When you’re running a marathon, you tend to look forward to its end, regardless of how pleasant or unpleasant you find the whole experience in hindsight. Most scientists agree that negative splits—running the second half faster than the first—is the best way to do it. It is a nice feeling, picking up the pace, that final kick when you can see the finish line, knowing each mile has been an improvement from the last. It’s a freefall in those rare moments when the stars align and everything feels right. The delightful sensation of going faster and faster and faster until suddenly you've crossed the finish line. You stare at your medal and marvel at the fact that months of training have somehow concluded in a matter of hours that suddenly don’t feel so strenuous when you look back on them. A sense of satisfaction knowing that it’s over, the slightest gut punch to the stomach at the same realization, and then the itch to sign up for something new.

***

Who was it that first taught me about acceleration? 

Maybe Lucas. After all, he was the one to teach me about prime numbers, private schools, Python, the film Double Indemnity, the broad nexus between entertainment and technology. Brown, the right classes to take, how to email professors, how to read a text message, how to read a textbook. At some point in the last 21 years, he might have mentioned Newton’s laws. 

Or maybe it was some summer camp long ago, hardly remembered, the physics program my parents forced me into, or the one I voluntarily signed up for. I recall building hoverboards out of wood and lawn blowers in between lessons about the governing rules of the universe. We rode them down one of the teachers’ friend’s very long and steep driveway. I saw a dead bird on the walk over. I was terrified. 

Really, though, I think I learned Newton’s second law during the February of my gap year in Queenstown, New Zealand. I’d decided, on a whim the night before, that I would go skydiving. I learned the way a change in velocity feels across a series of moments. One moment, crying over a girl, signing up, the next, riding the shuttle to the airfield, and then, faster and faster, boarding the plane, ascending, heartbeat accelerating in tandem with the roar of the engines, the roar in my ears, the roar of time warped. One by one, I watched people tumble out of the plane’s open door. 

Another step and I could see just how far I would fall—just how empty the space below was. The knowledge that I can’t do this matched simultaneously with the knowledge that it’s not up to me. 

I’d like to say that the moment I jumped was when I realized: Skydiving is the closest you can get to flying. But this is nonfiction, and so instead I must be honest. I was strapped to an instructor who jumped for me. 

Here’s the funny part: The fear falls away as you do. 

***

I claim to be afraid of time passing. 

I find myself heart-full, so crammed with meaningful things that I am overwhelmed, desperate for respite. Always hoping for the weekend to come sooner, simultaneously hoping that the weeks don’t pass too fast. Let me just get to the end of this week, this month, past this set of assignments, past this race, let me just get to the end of this life first, and then I’ll enjoy it. 

What would I even say to her if we still spoke? 

Sophia, did you know that since the last time I saw you, I learned to fence and got really into running and ended up at Brown? Sophia, did you know that I listened to the Arctic Monkeys and Glass Animals songs you introduced me to so many times that they don’t remind me of you anymore? Sophia, did you know that I have had my heart broken three more times since we broke up? Once by the girl who told me I could be friends with you in two years, once by another girl with your name, and once by an editor, a boy who could delete me in suggestion mode, blue strikethrough erasing a proposed friendship, a summary comment at the top of a Google Doc that reads: “I don’t care about you anymore. Also, you should work on those run-on sentences.”

Sophia, you knew me when I had just finished my stint as a depressed high schooler, in October 2021, when we went to that homecoming football game together, still masked, if I’m remembering right. Did you know that in October 2022, I was living in Spain? Did you know that in October 2023, I was a D3 athlete at a small liberal arts college? Did you know that in October 2024, I switched to Brown and joined a sorority? Did you know that October 2025 will be the first October in three years that I’ve spent in the same place? And yet, everyone we graduated high school with is now graduating college. How can this be your last year when we were once the same age? Matter of fact, you were two weeks younger. We were seventeen together. How did you spend your last three Octobers? The me of October 2021 was not the me of October 2022, was not the me of October 2023, was not the me of October 2024, was probably not even the me that October 2025 will bring. But I know nothing of the Octobers that have changed you. Three years ago, you weren’t a stranger. I have no idea how three years have already gone by. 

***

It’s been 11 years since I moved to the Bay Area, 11 since meeting Sophia, three since I last saw her. Three since the situationship with the girl who suggested I wait two years, two since I went skydiving to forget her. 

(By the way, it’s only fast for the first minute or so. The parachute yanks you back in a matter of seconds, so fast you wonder if you blinked and missed the experience altogether, so fast that you remember sitting in the plane almost nauseous before jumping, better than the actual freefall.) 

It’s been two years since my gap year ended, two years since running my first marathon and then starting college at Haverford. I’ve been at Brown for over a year. How has it already been over a year? A few months since I realized there were so many firsts after her after all. 

How can college be slipping out of my fingers already? Exes gone, classes taken and completed, countless runs, six marathons, even though I swear I just started running. I know I'm supposed to live in the moment, but the moments keep coming and going, all at once, too fast to record, too fast to even remember. 

***

The fitness-social media app Strava has a feature that will occasionally show you “Your activity from 2 years ago.” Today, I ran five miles down the East Bay Bike path. Two years ago, I did a two-mile loop around Haverford’s Nature Trail. I don’t remember the run, but I do remember the trail. I’d like to go back sometime, visit, run it again. 

***

If I had to leave a comment at the top of a Google Doc about me and Sophia, it would say, “I don’t care about you anymore. And I have no idea if you use too many run-on sentences or not.” 

But I know for a fact that 17-year-old her would’ve gotten the grammar right. 

***

Lucas still builds stuff. He’s a software engineer at A24 now. He moved to Brooklyn. He put together another 3D printer last year.