Here are things I miss - in a stream of consciousness sort of way:

Watching Gilmore Girls with Mom, the way I can settle next to her on the couch and how I fit perfectly against her, and how it feels like time can never take that away, like perhaps she’ll always be able to make me feel like her baby. And I guess, how simple everything was at that time in my life. I miss all the regular things that I could prop my life up against for guidance and a sense of structure - the trivial things that I used to think were just filler but have turned out to be surpisingly fundamental. I miss those.

They say San Diego doesn’t have seasons, but really it does, in a beautiful, subtler way. And I feel myself missing the way Summer indiscreetly makes it’s exit while Fall slips secretly in, back at home, how the light changes and the air has a go at being crisp but actually just loses it’s summer thickness and feels fresh and slightly thinner. Maybe places with four distinct seasons are nicer or more exciting, but to me it feels unnecessarily harsh. San Diego has an artfully smooth way of changing seasons, like the atmosphere is running on some implicit poetic meter. I love the way the ocean is beautiful and welcoming no matter the time of year, how the beaches have a constancy that makes them addicting in a life-giving sense. I am honestly convinced that San Diego holds the copyright on casual and unforced classiness.

And maybe more than anything, I miss the in-between moments of home. I love the quality of light in the late afternoon – how it brings all the colors to fruition – and when Dad gets home from work we sometimes get out the camera and take pictures outside of the hummingbirds or the sunset. And the way cups of coffee bring us all together – in the kitchen or the patio outside, sometimes we rehash our days but sometimes we just soak up the stillness of the afternoon or midmorning together. I miss the way that a house can harbor memories and perhaps parts of me, too, in the most unusual places. Even while my flat is finally becoming home, it’s not the same way that home is home. Here my lamp and my desk and closet are just that. But at home, my closet is the one that has awful neon colored drawers that I love only because Dad expressly painted them so, thinking I’d like them. And my room has traces of all my friends, knickknacks or notes they left that are irritatingly scattered about my desk. And how the laundry room is a whole world of hidden treasures, and sometimes I stumble upon an old box that takes me back and there goes my whole day.