It’s the summer after I graduated high school, and as Instagram would have me know, I should be leaning one casual shoulder against the dusty wall of a cathedral on a European street bathed in afternoon sun. I should be floating in turquoise waters and basking on the gleaming white bows of sailboats and dancing under purple club lights all night. In some miraculously lit marble-and-gold bathroom, I’ll meet my future self, the older one, the better one, waiting patiently halfway around the world to be discovered.
Unfortunately for Barcelona’s struggling tourism industry, I’m a sucker for tradition. I’m writing curled up between the sofa and the bookshelf in a town 1,400 miles away from my own city, the one that, nonetheless, has housed my most precious memories all the way into their vanishing point in the murky past.
For the last 18 summers and winters, I’ve packed the portable elements of my life into a heavy black suitcase and hopped on a plane to a little island in the Alaskan panhandle. Sitka, a town with less than 10,000 inhabitants, has seen me grow up little by little — in some ways, more than my hometown of San Francisco.
It’s a cold summer day, and we’re in the woods trudging uphill among ferns and lush trees. Black mulch sinks underfoot as we climb up makeshift steps fashioned from wooden boards. I’m not from here, a fact no one forgets as long as my breath keeps coming out hot and loud, my ribs straining as I struggle to keep up even though I’ve made this trek a hundred times. I complain about the hills back home, rows of houses angled so absurdly that you feel as if you’re scaling a cliff just to make it home from Whole Foods or Goat Hill Pizza. But it’s different here: The air is thinner and so cold it hurts to breathe deeply.
At last, we’re at the top, and I forget the pain of the ascent. The lake is so clear and blue and inviting, even on a cold day, that I kick off my sneakers on the rocky shore. As my family settles on the beach, I wade in without bothering to remove my jeans or cable-knit sweater. Once the water reaches my shoulders, I push off and swim with slow strokes until the voices from shore are too far away to make out.
I float facedown and open my eyes underwater, reveling in the strange sensation of denim against my skin in the weightless cold. The water is clear and the colors beneath are bright and alien, mineral and organic, slate gray and kelp green and urchin purple and sea slug orange.
In the quiet of the moment, my mind drifts. When we were kids in the 2000s and televisions still buzzed with the red-green-blue static that made our eyes hurt, we used to wash our brains of Mister Rogers in the woods by the sea. We played there, chased each other around boulders and tangled root systems, dank and black rotting wood cracking softly underfoot and leaves everywhere making patterns in a thousand shades of green.
To think of being a kid again is to imagine myself back there, where fallen trees and low-hanging branches were structures in a mossy playground, where someone slipped pastel-colored Jordan almonds into my small hand to keep me from whining as my little boots stumbled all the way back to the car.
Everyone who knows me knows Sitka. I’ve told them everything I can think to tell: early sunsets and ice-skating on the lake in the winter, jumping off the dock and sprawling out on the sunny lawn in the summer. They’re sold: They text exclamation points when I land in town and comment enthusiastically on my social media posts. My pictures show ships on the water, storefronts on the main street, a sleek black crab curled in my palm.
They’ve heard enough but I keep telling them things anyway. I tell them about the food — clam chowder in waxy paper cups, salmon sandwiches in black-and-white checkered wrappers, cocoa-specked and foamy hot chocolate in thick-rimmed ceramic mugs. I describe the wildlife — fierce-eyed bald eagles with wild, white head feathers, salmon that spawn upstream in overwhelming numbers and die gasping in shallow puddles upset by rain, bear cubs that tumble in the grassy marsh like children. I tell them every other minute thing that comes to mind.
I think they understand that I will never be able to tell them what Sitka means to me in words, nor with the endless digital camera photos that I post to my grid. As much as I wish I could, I’ll never be able to capture the essence that makes everything mundane feel profound.
“The bookstore has a resident dog,” I want to say. “Isn’t that great? In the winter, we watch movies in the converted chapel in town. On the Fourth of July, the grocery store hands out bananas in the parade.”
It’s Monday, and I’m back over the Lower 48, grids of lights turning California below into a gilded model town as the plane descends, humming into the black. I’ll always love San Francisco: the gate to my best friend’s house that I make faces into until she buzzes me in; the downtown lights that blink red and green like Christmas in July, glinting off slick black roads in the rain; my room, with its creamy smell of candle wax and lemon cleaning solution, its carpeted floor, soft and familiar. But inevitably, I come back changed in some capacity, still seeing that white mist that curls cold fingers over the mountains, brushed by the black feathers of ravens whose wings catch the wind and send them wheeling in that endless gray sky.
I come back to Sitka, year after year, to meet my old selves — the past versions of me that jumped off the same dock, sprawled on the same bench, clutched the same mug. I come back to remember who I’ve been and discover who I’ve become since. And every visit, I find myself there, in the cold ocean — a version of myself I would never meet in warmer waters, thousands of miles away.
This will be the summer my parents buy a house in Sitka — the one my grandmother lived in, with the same gleaming wood floors and attic loft and bay window and salmonberry bushes. This is the summer my connection to the town becomes something more tangible than plane tickets and memories. Maybe next summer I’ll take my friends up to visit, and the parts of myself that have been kept apart will finally collide.
But in this moment, I know that there’s no way I can be closer to this place than when I was small and clung to the trunks of trees, when I was a weightless body far from shore, eyes pointing toward the incorporeal shapes of clouds.