Thoughts from San Diego
I feel like I’ve spent the last few months just waiting around — waiting for the snow to melt, for my bike to arrive, for my arm to heal, for roughly 10 discrete road rashes to heal up. San Diego had always been near the top of U.S. cities I’ve wanted to visit, and I needed to get a breath of fresh air outside of Richmond.
If I stay in a place for too long, it feels like tendrils begin sprouting out of my back, reaching out and planting roots in the area around me, and the only way I know how to break out is by physically getting out and into somewhere new. So to San Diego I went.
But I did not have the idyllic time I had in Austin, and I knew it was a fool’s errand to try to recreate it.
In San Diego, I spent less time at the bar and more taking walks through neighborhoods. Thanks to the hostel I stayed at, the door was open to go and indulge in San Diego’s nightlife, but I didn’t feel compelled to.
Ahead of Austin, I was completely healthy, clear-headed and flying. This spring, I’ve dealt with broken bones, some garden variety anxiety and a prolonged separation from my bike, my cure for whatever ails me. This trip was always going to be different. I’ve had a lovely time exploring this seemingly ethereal city with perfect weather, beautiful people and incredible food. But a few laidback days in a foreign land were what I needed, not a days-long bender.
And as I sit here in Copa Vida, a coffeeshop in the literal shadow of the Padres’ stadium, I find myself thinking about what John Green said about adulthood through the eyes of a college student: “To be an adult was to be a river rock blasted by an endless torrent of mundane terrors, from résumé formatting to electricity bills that would inevitably smooth all my hard edges until I looked and felt just like everything else.”
Submission to the torrents of adulthood is something I see around me more and more at 27, and it is not something I’m interested in doing. I’m choosing to see this trip to S.D. as emblematic of where I am right now, not a sign of those torrents wearing me down.
The task of committing everything to memory has been among the hardest things to come with being in my mid-20’s.
Through photos, journals, scars, tattoos, stickers, etc, I’ve picked up physical representations of places I’ve gone, people I’ve met, things I’ve done. I want to remember each and every meal, conversation, and night out I’ve had, and I want it all to be full-throttle. This time around, going full throttle meant just taking it easy.
