20 SOMETHING

Rest in Paradise

Lately there have been a number of tragedies that haven’t directly effected my life but have touched me emotionally. A close friend of my boyfriend’s from high school went missing on Christmas eve and drowned in a creek close to where I go to college. While I hadn’t had a relationship with him personally, I had gone to school with his younger brother and sister and their step dad had coached my high school softball team. I attended his service in support of his family and my boyfriend the week after his body was discovered in the creek. I saw many familiar faces, and among them were people experiencing a heart breaking amount of regret for not staying in touch with their lost friend. I will say that hearing the cries of a mother who had lost her child was the single most horrifyingly painful sound I have ever heard in my life. His close friends celebrated what would have been his 24th birthday the week after his service with a party in his honor, and even though my boyfriend couldn’t attend, I know that he remembers and honors his fallen friend every day.

Today one of my good friend’s former boyfriend passed away. While I know little about his circumstances, I do know that he was young, a year or two out of college maybe, and that he had his entire life ahead of him. My friend hadn’t kept in touch with him after they broke off their relationship, but his passing is extremely hard for her. These deaths were so unexpected that it makes me wonder when I will get my first phone call telling me that I’ve lost someone I love just as suddenly as my friends have lost theirs.

When I think of my old friends and the tragic way that they lost their older brother, it immediately brings me to tears. When I think about the way that his death leaves behind so many unanswered questions and how we never get a fair warning before someone is taken from us, I realize that the only thing we can do to remedy that is to live our own lives well and tell our friends that we love them. To not take those in our lives for granted is the only way to minimize our regret when we lose them. 

I was just discussing earlier today how tragedies bring people together and how they are able to put things into perspective for us. Like how the passing of an old friend can make you remember how much you care for people that you haven’t spoken to in months or even years, and how the sudden death of someone can make us cherish our own lives and time on this planet a little bit more. The shame is that most of the time it does take these heart wrenching losses for us to reconnect with people we still care about or to think about the choices that we’ve made. I have always strived to be open with my heart and tell the people that I love that I do so as to not have any regrets later on, but these tragedies always make me wonder if that’s enough. 

May all lost souls rest eternally in paradise.

The internet diaries/City-split

This blog used to have a bunch of different reasons to exist, but I think the real reason I created it in the first place was to have somewhere to put all of my thoughts (good and bad) when they start to take up too much space in my head… and that happens a lot more than I like to admit. So prepare yourselves to hear what I really think about anything and everything that happens in my weird and sometimes so-suburban life. Welcome to my internet diary :)

Right now I live in Los Angeles just a few miles from Santa Monica, where I was born, and I could not be more excited about moving back to what I consider my real home of San Francisco where my mom lives and where I grew up. Don’t get me wrong - I think LA is a fabulous place to live, but only if you have the right people to live in it with you. As one of my old frenemies used to say “It’s not where you are, it’s who you’re with.” Even though she was kind of a major pain in the ass with her unrelenting philosophical crap, she was spot on about this one. You can live in any of the most amazing cities in the world, but if the people that you love aren’t close enough to you, then even places like the sunny city of LA will feel cold.

Thankfully, I’ve learned something important about myself in the past year. I’ve always felt that my little suburbia bubble just north of San Francisco was the only place I could ever truly feel at home. At home the food is expensive but unbeatable (I could eat a Sol Food bistec sandwich everyday of my fat short life), the people are friendlier (excluding all high school girls), and the streets are safer (if you don’t count all of the bored, drug-crazed kids who spend their allowance on anything they can smoke or sniff and might break into your house so they can sell your Forever21 fake jewelry and Christmas presents for more drug money… yeah that happened to me).

But then something happened: I had to live alone in Los Angeles for a solid year with all of my close friends having moved out of the immediate area. Yeah yeah I did have my dad, my step mom, and my three half brothers 20 minutes away. But trust me when I tell you that 2 video game obsessed munchkins, a moody teenage boy and two workaholic parents do not make for an entertained girl. But somehow this lonely, cement city filled with Hollywood-wannabes and terrible drivers has grown on me in the past few months, and I have finally realized that since home is where the heart is, my heart belongs in two very different California cities. Thank god its only an hour long plane ride from SFO to LAX.

Even though my heart is city-split, my head has never faltered in knowing that San Francisco is the best city in the world. There is so much love, pride and acceptance that comes with being from the Bay Area, and having grown up just 15 minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge, naturally I spent this past Memorial Day Weekend in San Francisco to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of San Francisco’s most famous landmark. Would it be wrong to tell you that I might have been teary eyed watching these fireworks go off over the bridge? I’m still not sure if it was because I love San Fran so much or because my friend’s boat was so close to the bridge that the ashes from the fireworks were actually getting in my eyes but either way it was incredible!

Here’s to hoping that everyone is able to find some of that San Francisco magic in their lives. Sweet Dreams!