"letters for a lifetime" #2: teenage tormentation

These little breaks I have at home are so strange. I’m sure the average college student has a wavering time trying to decipher adulthood while constantly being pulled back into your childhood, but living all the way across the country makes it all the more sentimental. My two worlds really exist on their own planes—I mean they literally run on different times, you can’t blame a girl for feeling split at the seams.

I know it’s supposed to help us get adjusted to life on our own, but it seems to only remind me of what could have been—or rather, what used to be. Obviously it’s very circumstantial, so I’ll give you some context.

This summer was the best of my life. Aside from being the “last hurrah” before college, on its own, late June to mid August 2022 contained some of my favorite memories. It’s weird making extreme observations on things that were retrospectively inevitable. It’s like there’s no other way it could have happened, so making any suspicions or statements claiming otherwise seems delusional.

In this case, the summer was perfectly timed with me (finally) getting my license and covid restrictions getting lifted (again). On top of that, I rekindled with and met some of my favorite people ever. Their presence allowed me to be fully myself in a world that I had yet to find such comfortability other than within a close friend or two. But of course, as all teenage tragedies commence, we hit the peak of our friendships in the final weeks before my move.

Fortunately, some of my closest friends from this period stayed in San Diego, so my times in town remain an ever pleasant return home.

* * *

Reflecting on the branching out of this new life of mine, I grew quite reminiscent of the times I left at home.

And what is any song of mine without a little hopeless romanticism.

I started “intertwined” a few weeks into living in New York—the first song that I wrote in the city, in fact. However, it wasn’t until I had returned home in November that I found the words to finish it.

Evidently in the song, I yearn for my eager return to San Diego and in turn with my—for lack of better words—hometown lover. Thinking on it now, “intertwined” is almost the backwards mirror image of “shortfall.” In the first, I eagerly await the days I am reunited with a good friend of mine, while in the latter, I detail my anxious worries about a similar impending reunion.

Both songs talk about the inevitable meeting between me and someone I am or was once close with, but share quite different sides of the story.

These days at home again enable so much introspection in me—Both a blessing and a curse while I navigate the trials and torments of young love and living.

I leave you with this journal excerpt of mine from this era:

And it’s such a beautiful feeling to be oh but a foolish girl holding onto something that may never be the same.

How amazing it is to not have everything figured out. To blindly go into love, regardless of how temporary or the pain it may bring.

Because how pain is so human—and I may be tormented by life, but it proves I am living.

Talk soon,

Mia