I'm sitting at the Abbey coffee shop, just a block down from my old off campus house that I shared with my six swim team mates, which, coincidentally I never ever came to except like once my senior year spring quarter to meet with a professor of mine who was holding office hours.
It's just so funny, the last time I was sitting here was over three years ago, spring quarter 2013, when I was getting ready to graduate from college, having to scramble to finish the last of my required classes at Santa Cruz.
Now, I'm here three years later, still carrying around my 2011 Macbook in my laptop messenger bag that my mother bought for me back before my junior year of college, except now the zipper has almost run off track, the threads have ripped and it's barely held together but it's almost like I never left. I'm sitting here with all my essentials that I carried around throughout my college career at UCSC, except I now have my Boston University tote bag, to connote that I've graduated for a second time.
Isn't it amazing how much things change in just a few years? It may seem like not a long time ago but whenever you come back to the place you once lived at, grew to love, and said goodbye to, the returning part is always weird. In ever journey and every path you take, you're writing a new chapter in your life, a new installment in your book, but when you return to an old, former place, it's like re-opening the old book, flipping back a few pages into the earlier chapters and re-reading it again, except with new reading glasses. The new reading glasses come from the fact that you see things in a new perspective, because the old perspective you used to have has now been thrown out. It's because you left a place, a community that you knew everything about, then left, went somewhere new where you learned a lot, you went out to experience a bunch of things, then came back to the old place. You come back to a former place, an old home to tell them all about it, all that you learned while you were out there in the new places. I don't know how to explain it, and I know there's a much better way to explain it but it's been a long weekend and I can't gather all my thoughts together quite well. I visited the swimming pool, finally saw my old college swim coach for the first time in two years, spent my time with the few friends I have left here and it's just so strange how everything feels. I never thought I'd come back to Santa Cruz after I left for Boston, but I realized that it's always going to be an important part of my life, a vital experience in my 20s, a time in my life I'm never going to forget and will always cherish.
You don't realize how much you took for granted until after you say goodbye and come back to it for a quick visit. Even when I see my friends, now that I've been able to see them after I moved back to California after graduating from Boston last year, it never gets old.
Every time I'm up here I realize how things used to be when I was 22-23 years old, and now at 26, I can't believe that I went to UCSC five years ago and how much I didn't know about anything. I was naive, immature and clueless. I mean, I still am, and I still don't know anything at 26, but I just remember how much I learned the past three years since I left, and now I feel like I have so many stories to tell the city that I eventually grew to love. There's no place like Santa Cruz, and there's a reason why I always come back to it. It always calls me home. I will always call it home. It was the first city I ever moved to after moving away from southern California. It was the first city I lived in where I knew no one and my parents were far away from me. Santa Cruz was the city where a lot of firsts happened for me, at age 21. I experienced a lot of new things here, it was the first city that really taught me a lot of lessons I never got to learn while living at home. I think that's why it'll always be held close to my heart---it was the first new city I ever lived in.
Boston was different because it was my second time living somewhere new, except it was on the completely opposite end of the coast, so it was a bit more overwhelming but nonetheless, still just as enriching of an experience.
I've been thinking a lot about my time in college lately, especially because I'm still so close in touch with all my best friends from there. I've always wondered if it was naive of me to not be able to move on from college days especially after I went to graduate school in Boston, but I realize that it doesn't matter. These are the friends that I'm going to keep forever in my life. They'll always be a part of me, a part of my best experience, a part of my favorite memories and everything else in between. I don't see it as a "not being able to move on with my life" kind of thing but rather, never forgetting where I came from. I thought I'd never see these people ever again after I moved to Massachusetts two years ago but it's funny how I always made sure to come back. Now that I live near SLO and central California, I've been back at least three different times now.
It felt like living in the east coast the past two years was more of a quick break from home, but never longer than quick break. Isn't that funny?
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