I know the path to the beach by heart.

The main road of my hometown runs south all the way down to the Pacific, just a half-hour ride from California chaparral to open water. Once you leave my house, it only takes 10 minutes for the houses and buildings to fall away—The rest of the drive snakes through the Santa Monica Mountains, scrubby green brush draped over rock and sand, blunted peaks soaring into blue sky.

As a kid, I’d nod off in the backseat, trusting the rhythm of my dad easing the car along the hills’ curves. Now I’ve taken to being the one who sits behind the steering wheel, windows down, sunroof cracked to let in the salty breeze. I blast Maggie Rogers and Remi Wolf when I’m with my friends; I hold soft conversation when I’m with my mom.

My college friends have complained time and time again that I embody all the stereotypes: West Coast through and through, the Californian who never stops talking about it. But I’d like to think that if they ever visited the shores of my home, they’d change their minds. Once you’ve nestled your body into a hollow of sun-warmed sand—paddled out into crashing waves and seafoam––turned around to look at a suddenly-distant shoreline, wondered at the smallness of the things you left behind there, there is no going back to who you were before. There is no going back.

* * *

When I visited the shoreline as a kid, my favorite activity was always tidepooling—I’d dip two stubby fingers in and squeal at the coldness of bright bat stars creeping their way slowly across the rocks. Red urchins waved a thousand slender spikes with an overwhelming leisure in the saltwater current I stirred up. Even the turban snails seemed to acknowledge my presence––although I could only see their pyramidal shells jutting up into the shallow pools, I’d picture their antennae waving inside, saying hello to me. I imagined what it would be like to be that small. Sunbeams shafting through the water, your whole world cupped in the arc of a rockfall.

I liked that I was steady-footed enough to hold my balance while investigating the tide pools, even perched on moss-slicked rocks. I liked that while the waves crashed ceaselessly behind me, I could sit there and study the stillness of my own little world, the way the sunlight played off of the eddies and whirlpools, the way a million blades of grass swayed under the clear blue surface.

Mostly, I think I liked that I felt big. I towered over all the tide pool creatures; each one fit in my hand. I lorded over my own tiny realm. If I angled my body right, I could cast the whole thing in my little-girl shadow.

* * *

My mother is not a sentimental person, but she does keep a plastic box full of the seashells my sister and I brought home from the coast over the years. As kids, we’d pluck them from the sand, study them with delight, and then promptly forget about them.

A few years ago, I’d been searching in the cabinet for batteries and came upon the box instead. I rooted through the shells, felt their solid weights shuffle through my fingertips. I picked up a dark mussel shell, its insides gleaming white, opalescent.

My mom watched with amusement from the corner as—out of some deep-seated childhood instinct—I cupped the shell to my ear.

“Can you hear the water yet?” she said.

* * *

In seventh grade, I traveled with the rest of my class to Catalina Island off the coast of Long Beach. As I dissected a squid with the girl who would become my best friend, some other girls started a whispered dare that if you ate a squid eye, the boy you liked would confess to you tomorrow. My almost-best-friend popped one of them in her mouth, and I the other—small dark pearls, with a surprising firmness—and we both giggled and rolled the tiny orbs on our tongues; they tasted like rubber and salt. I imagined tentacles sprouting in my stomach and the slouchy, tousle-haired boy in social studies holding my hand the next morning.

The teacher gave us instructions for dissecting the squid: how to tease out the long strings of its intestines, how to scalpel off its fins, how to locate and retrieve its three once-alive hearts from the dark slime of its insides. A breakdown of a body. A manual to life.

Later that night, we swam out into the Pacific, trembling when the freezing waves licked at our wetsuits. I remember that I couldn’t quite figure out how to fit the snorkel between my lips. Each time I dipped my face in the water, salt water flooded into my mouth, and I shivered at the taste. 

Our group of teens chattered and paddled into open water. We beamed our flashlights down and around, searching the sand below for interesting fish, but all we caught were rocks and the flash of a singular garibaldi’s tail as it raced away. Quickly, we began to grumble with disappointment.

Instead, our guide told us to turn off our flashlights. Begrudgingly, we did, and when we dipped our faces into the dusk-dark water, it glowed. A million glowing flecks of silver, drifting around and through our bodies. My mouth full of salt, I gasped at the depths of the ocean, the light it contained.

Later, our guide explained to us that it was bioluminescence, and those dots were dinoflagellates, and the phenomenon was driven by light-emitting chemical reactions within the plankton’s bodies. I didn’t care; I just called it magic. I still do.

* * *

Part of me thought that I might stay with the first boy I ever kissed, all broad palms and soft fingers. We’d journey from coast to coast to see each other, and the hours would be arduous, and we’d fight over FaceTime, but it’d be worth it in the end, when we found our way back—back to each other.

Part of me thought that my mouth would never unlearn any of the names of my hometown best friends. Over the breaks, we’d fit back together as if nothing had ever changed; I’d know the intimate details of their new and loose lives, and they mine. The idea of “growing apart” would be something that we only ever heard adults commiserate about, and we’d laugh at the absurdity of that concept. Things would be easy—for us, for the relationships we’d fostered with each other.

But time and distance have a funny way with these things, and now I’ve seen both of those stories through. Now I’ve finished my first year of college, and I’m walking along Zuma Beach with my friend—a senior at my old high school—and she’s asking, “Did you always want to leave California?”

Tide pools, and sweaty summer days, and UV indices of eight. Sunroofs down, and salt air, and first kisses under pomegranate trees at dusk. The sound of my sister laughing. The sound of calling gulls.

“Maybe part of me did,” I said. “Just to see what’s out there.”

“And what’s out there?” she asked.

* * *

In August, before school starts, we go to Narragansett. We’re all nervous for classes, and for leading orientation—the 17 new souls we each are about to be tasked with. But as soon as we step out we know today will be anything but relaxing. The beach teems with people, and the sand is gravelly. In the distance, the waves are roaring.

It’s warm and only two of us had the foresight to wear the proper swimwear. The picnic blanket is too small for the rest of us and my denim shorts get sandy instantly and the sunlight is so hot, it feels like we’re baking.

I squint my eyes, and my vision is more bright than black. For an hour, I doze in and out of sleep as ABBA floats from my friend’s speaker and gulls scuttle around our blanket.

Somebody passes around a rock, and we each carve our initials into it with a particularly sturdy woodchip. I’m the last one to get it; when I flip it into my palm, it’s already warm. 

Back in Providence, the humidity is almost oppressive. I track sand all over my dorm room—so new that the walls are still bare and the shelves empty. My suitcases yawn from the floor, dripping clothing and paraphernalia that I hadn’t bothered to unpack yet. 

I roll up my sleeves and get to work.

* * *

What’s out here: icy winters, and parkas, and weeks on end without the temperature rising above freezing. Long delirious hours in the library, and twin-sized beds, and a severe lack of fresh fruit.

And also: a crown-molded fireplace in my room, and perfect scarlet autumn, and musical theater. Snow angels, bus rides downtown, late nights spent crying, late nights spent cry-laughing. Fairy lights and red walls, green grass and guitar music. The feeling of loving a class. The feeling of a hand fitting into mine.

Trauma and tragedy and grief. Healing, too.

New people. New homes, new dreams. Seawater. Shorelines. That’s what’s out here, I sing back through time, and now I imagine these words traveling like ripples, like plankton glowing in the watery dark.

* * *

At night, I dream myself away from this winter, back to Leo Carrillo Beach, where I dig my heels into the sand, feel it shift beneath me. I clamber over tide pools and clutch mussels in my hands. I sink into low tide.

And in the days I inhabit this life, and this life, too, is the shoreline. I’m looking for little wonders, starfish and tide pools. I’m walking myself away from the ground I knew.

Now the waves rush around me, pound in my ears, swallow my body whole. Now I swim out into the open ocean and the current takes me with it, and all the weird and wonderful things of the world shine to me from the depths. Mom, I hear the water now. I’m plunging into it.