He had a beautiful back, a swimmer’s back, all broad shoulders and gold skin. And he was smiling, always smiling, and it was a smile that was in his eyes, too. Being in love with him was easy. It felt natural, good, safe.

He was gone before she knew it, and in the years that followed, there were times when she became almost convinced that he’d been a fantasy, willed into life by her own loneliness and yearning for what she’d never really believed could be hers. She had known as soon as she’d met him that this would be her first and last brush with happiness, and, as her body aged and the edges of her memory softened, she remained suspended between the desire to forget and the despair at not being able to remember. It was only the memory of his back, how real and tangible and there it had been beneath her fingertips, that convinced her that he’d been there at all, that she’d been his, and that, for just a moment, she’d really been that happy.

She didn’t know which came first, seeing Adam or knowing he was there. Did the whole party’s pulse jump and quicken and howl or was it just hers? He was tanned and rumpled as ever, and she was surprised at just how easily she—her whole body—fell in tune with him.

He wove his way through the clusters, all eager to see him, to even begin to understand him, until finally, at long long last, he came to hers, and her urge to flee was kept at bay only by the overwhelming need to be near him, to be looked at by him. She hugged him in turn, not recognizing the sound of her own voice when she said hi and how are you and he echoed the same. As he continued through the crowd, her body relaxed, pulse slowing and evening, awash in a total body sigh of relief even as her chest ached at the loss of him. And as she nodded and laughed along with the faceless friends she was standing with, her attention stayed with him. Just like it had been in high school, people marveled at him, wondered, admired, envied. He was himself, fully and without shame, just as he always had been, just as none of them—herself included—could ever be. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, not fully, and gravitated like a dance to everywhere he was not. And when she finally felt him come to stand beside her, she could not speak, could not look, couldn’t even acknowledge.

As the temperature dropped and the veil of shade inched its way along the pool and patio, she heard less and less of the conversation around her, every cell turning its manic attention to him, anxious that he might be leaving, anxious that if this turned into yet another missed opportunity, maybe she hadn’t grown all that much after all—maybe it really was that easy to regress into the person she used to be. And when she saw finally that he had begun to say his goodbyes and gather his things, her chest constricted on itself and the terror of regret sunk deep into her bones. Five years of silence between them and suddenly there he was, right in front of her, just as he’d been for the past three hours that she’d chosen to fill with avoidance and longing and regression. These were her high school classmates but they were not in high school. She was not seventeen anymore.

Her hands were shaking but she went to him. Her words ran together but she spoke to him. With him, she called her beauty into question, finding that even with the added defense of her wonderful, fantastic, oh so grown up life, nothing could shield her from feeling insecure and self-conscious and so ridiculously seventeen as she finally, five years later and probably too late, looked him in the eye and said she was sorry.

She could hear him tell her that it was okay, that it was a long time ago, that they had both learned a lot—as gracious and good as he’d always been. And though at that moment she wished that things had been (still could be?) different, she knew that it didn’t really matter. She had done it, and that weight, that regret she had conjured and clung to since a clear morning in May when the fear of love/intimacy/desire/growing up had turned her cold, could now be left to the past, left to seventeen, left and taken no further.

They hugged goodbye with vague promises to see each other soon, sometime, in the future, maybe, and as her hand rested on the thinning cloth of his t-shirt, she knew that she would never know it past this moment when it brushed across her skin during farewell, just as she had, for one night a thousand years ago, known the flying beat of his heart at the edge of her fingertips.

She headed back to the party, not watching him go, relieved and grown up and mournful that this was really the end. She had waited five years to rid herself of seventeen and actions/inactions brought on by fear, and now she was left with a loss, an absence she knew she need not refill in spite of a lingering what if.

They were not seventeen. They did not live in each other’s worlds and did not know the people they had each become at twenty two. And regardless of whatever relationship they might have had or even still could have, that likely would not change. So she laughed and talked with her friends until the sun retreated behind the hills, feeling the regret/relief of closure, feeling that there was a chance she had been awakened anew. She had found her voice, her courage, and the conviction that some things were more important than fear or pride or feeling ridiculous and oh so seventeen. In him she saw two incarnations of herself, clear as day and representing exactly how far she had come. And more than the what ifs, the maybes, the all that could have beens, what mattered was that she had spoken, that she had looked him in the eye and proved to both of them that she had grown, she had learned, and that she was no longer the same person who at seventeen had been paralyzed and muted by her own fear. She was a little bit older and a little bit wiser, and racing heart/shaking hands/stumbling words aside, for now, that was enough.

I’m sitting in my car watching the bay. It’s a clear day, warm and breezy, the kind summers here are made of. Through the haze and across the water is San Francisco, distant and elusive (to me at least) as ever.

This is where I’m from—this is where I was born and where I spent eighteen years. I had a small life here, quiet and narrow and mostly unambitious. My favorite place was my bedroom, the same one that had always been mine, and I’d spend my weekends there, sitting at my desk next to the open window, writing stories and watching movies and dreaming of the life I knew one day I would have, the life that now, at 22, I’m finally growing into.

I loved my small life, and for those eighteen years it was enough. And when I went home for the holidays during my freshman year of college, it was a haven, a beacon I had counted down the days to see, a protector to stave off the isolation and loneliness and homesickness that had swallowed me whole that first semester.

It’s been a year since I’ve been here and for the first time it feels fully and finally different. Somehow, gradually and quietly over the past four years of holiday breaks and summer visits, the axis of home has shifted, and that once-new place that at 18 felt so foreign and daunting, now feels warm and comfortable and exciting and mine—like home. And this place, the one I longed for when I was away and despaired at having to leave, feels like another life, one I am happy to have left behind.

In these four years I have realized myself. I have realized my ambition and my happiness and the life I want to be living.

This town is like a time capsule, filled with familiar faces and places and the memories of a childhood. And as happy as I am to see my family, I do not want to be here. It feels oppressive, like being dragged backward.

Maybe the break between childhood and adulthood (or personhood since it feels like just that) is too recent, too close to me still, and in time coming back here will fill me only with fondness and nostalgia for what was long ago. As it is now, I can’t wait to drive back down the 5, back to my city, my home, my life.

This might be what growing up feels like—or, at the very least, outgrowing.