There is still sand in the navy blue
flats I wore to Long Island the day the three of us went to brunch and ended up on the beach.

"I don't know if you know this," I said, "but I'm a Californian who doesn't like the beach."

That's not entirely true--some of my best memories come from evenings on piers, and watching the waves from the sand. The beach is unavoidable when you spend four years in Orange County. What I hated were crowded beaches in the daytime and sunburnt bros and the sand that followed you home and appeared for months in clothing you never even took to the beach in the first place.

But hopping on that train last October and heading out to a beach, the first I'd been to since moving to the East Coast, was refreshing, rejuvenating. It wasn't just the fresh air and the empty sidewalks; it was being with two amazing people while close to the ocean again, and laughing over torn cardigans and spilt ketchup.

That was only six months ago. It feels like it's been years. I don't remember much about the city or the streets there, and I can barely recognize the friends I fell asleep next to so comfortable on the train.

This French novelist once said, "The more things change, the more they stay the same." I used to scoff at that notion because if things were always changing, how could I hold onto the love and the dreams and the optimism? You feel certain things when you're 16, 18, 21, 22 in new and different ways. I couldn't imagine being who I am today with the same thoughts and feelings of a 16 year old.

But what I think that saying really means is that there are memories you hold inside of you that don't ever change, and that sometimes it's the insecurities you may have felt as a 10 year old on the playground or the mistrust you've held in your heart since you were 18 that remain so deeply engraved on the cover of your life. There's a part of you that is built on all of the things you've never forgotten--whether they be good memories or bad ones--and even as you grow up and learn more and become somebody new with each passing year, you can't ever really distance yourself from memories and from the past. Maybe sometimes that's a good thing, maybe sometimes it isn't.

The person I am today is built on the foundation of every experience I've ever had. Those beach-filled memories of bonfires and boardwalks and little bottles of alcohol tucked into a crevice between us in the sand don't just disappear. No, perhaps they became painful to see all around, and it was best to leave it behind, to move forward onto new memories and a new chapter, but it doesn't mean they're gone.

I've been in New York for over a year now, but it feels like less because I didn't really start that new chapter until it was almost too late. I guess I didn't expect those old memories to follow me 3,000 miles east, and I think that's why I'm not done with New York yet, even though the chance to leave it could be just a phone call away. Perhaps I don't love things now the way I did six months ago, but I know I loved them once. That didn't disappear. I still have the sand to prove it.

After Joan Didion's husband died, she knew she wanted an autopsy. Not just wanted one--she actively wanted one:

"If whoever it was at New York Hospital who asked me to authorize an autopsy experienced such anxiety I could have spared him or her. I actively wanted an autopsy. I actively wanted an autopsy even though I had seen some, in the course of doing research. I knew exactly what occurs, the chest opens like a chicken in a butcher's case, the face peeled down, the scale in which the organs are weighed. I had seen homicide detectives avert their eyes from an autopsy in progress. I still wanted one. I needed to know how and why and when it had happened." 

-The Year of Magical Thinking

I won't pretend that being 24 makes me older or wiser in any way. I remember, as a child, thinking that each birthday meant some big change: I would suddenly gain some knowledge I didn't have before right at the stroke of midnight, and it would be what separated me from the age I had been to the age I had become.

Of course that isn't true, and so now having been 24 for just a blink of an eye, I can tell you what I've really learned over the course of the last year or two:

I've learned how to have faith in the midst of a crisis, and how to find joy despite the heaviness that may sit on your shoulders. I've learned how to step back and see the bigger picture, and how to hold my head high and move forward. I've learned about the people in your life who truly matter, and have learned to understand the importance of forgiveness and unconditional love. I've learned that life can be the fullest at the quietest moments, and that you should never take the small things like a handshake or a laugh for granted.

Rather than come up with resolutions or a list of things I want to accomplish between now and 2014, I think my goal will be to just keep going. That notion seems so simple and so obvious, but for those who know me, you know what a struggle that itself has been.

So...onward!

We sat through the credits, and when the lights came up in the small theater, we exited and sat in the parking lot for a moment or two longer. Before we knew it, hours had passed. Our conversation had eclipsed the length of the movie, and all we could talk about was the pain of what we’d been entangled in: love.

We drove back to my place, and along the way he settled upon a song—this song. “This is what I’m thinking of,” he said. It was random, out-of-the-blue, but so appropriate for the tragedy we’d just witness on screen.

Here was Blue Valentine—a film that attached inevitable heartbreak along with every romantic story—and here he was: a boy who would tell me he loved me, only to push me away every other week. Perhaps heartbreak would be inevitable for us, but I didn’t want to believe it was the canopy above every relationship.

Yet he always told me he believed in me, that I’d “make it,” that I’d soar. He said he didn’t want to hold me back, but I never saw him as a disappointment—not at the time, anyways.

“I won’t believe in love until I have proof that everyone doesn’t end up miserable,” he had said before turning off the car in the lot outside my building.

I told him I wished he believed me—that I loved him, and I wouldn’t turn my back on him. But when he dropped me off at the end of the night, I didn’t hug him goodbye.

The night I quit my sorority, I sat in Reveka's living room unsure of what to do next. I hadn't expected the identity crisis that came with leaving an organization that wasn't for me in the first place, but here I was--over a year into college and feeling more lost than when I first began.