I can’t wait to get far, far away from here. I hate this place. All of it. Get me to New England already.

Or so I wrote in my journal on March 28, 2024. I don’t journal that often. I’m usually not up to the task of dredging up all my grievances and making ephemeral, fleeting thoughts into real, concrete sentences, inked indelibly into a Moleskine. To relive and retell and reflect all over again is exhausting.

But it was the spring of junior year, and I had just returned from the soft light and shadow of the Northeast to the hard, flat glare of California. All I could think about was how much I wanted to leave again, to just get the hell out. Every cheerful Westridge senior sporting a college sweatshirt produced a little twinge of envy in my gut. They had an out, an escape plan, an exit strategy—and all I had was another month and a half of AP Bio lab revisions, ACT cramming, College Jumpstart, and senior year looming ominously ahead of me. My own happy ending seemed impossibly far away.

I must have been particularly pissed off at something or someone because I went on a rampage in my little red Moleskine notebook that night. I scribbled out a laundry list of everything I hated: Westridge was the first target, then Pasadena, then Los Angeles, then California. I hated the dry, brown hills that flank the sides of the freeway and can’t hold a candle to the towering pines and lush sugar maples that line New England highways. I hated the congestion of too many people in not enough space and its byproducts: traffic, crowds, competition for parking spaces and even seats for the stupid ACT. I hated influencer culture and conspicuous overconsumption—and resented the fact that so much of it seems headquartered in LA. Most of all, I hated the weather in all its relentless, monotonous glory. (By contrast, I was thrilled by the late-March “wintry mix” of freezing rain and snow in Massachusetts I’d just left.)

To me, the solution was simple. Just two words: New England.

I felt good about my decisiveness. Most of my peers were still waffling about matters I’d settled quickly—big schools or small, in-state or out-of-state, urban or rural. I had everything tied up in a bow, and in a rare moment of clarity, I knew exactly what I wanted. 

“I’m looking for a small, liberal arts college somewhere far away,” I declared in my very first college counseling meeting. “Somewhere with seasons.”

Fast forward one year. I now have what I always wanted: I am going to a small, liberal arts college somewhere far away, somewhere with seasons (Brunswick, Maine, to be precise). But last week, returning from an event for admitted students, I spent six long, uncertain hours stuck in the Chicago airport trying to get back to LA with not much to do and plenty of time to think. The downside of going to school “somewhere far away” is that there are no direct flights from LA—so even if the flights run on time, the travel day is long. But if one of those flights gets delayed or canceled, the travel day gets longer . . . indefinitely longer. So I had lots of time to let my mind wander.

To fill all the hours of waiting, I mindlessly scrolled through my camera roll, newly chock-full of photos from the event I’d just attended, trying to relive some of the excitement I’d felt. I couldn’t help but choke up a little as texts from soon-to-be classmates kept popping up. After all, this was everything I’d ever wanted—I had achieved my (collegiate) holy grail. But sitting there at the gate, clammy, sleep-deprived, and sandwiched between strangers, something unexpected bubbled up inside me, spilled into my consciousness, and articulated itself: I’m going to miss home.

Wait, what? I hadn’t planned on missing anything. For so long, leaving Los Angeles has been the goal—the prize—that I was unprepared for the double-whammy of a realization that LA is absolutely, unequivocally my “home” and that I actually sort of love and will miss (some parts of) it. Waiting there in the airport, trying desperately to get back to LA, the hard edges of my resentment toward it had softened. 

I’ll miss the pink glow that settles over the purple ridges of the San Gabriel Mountains at sunset. The jasmine vines curling up the sides of our chicken coop and perfuming the air in the spring. I’ll miss the familiar chaos of Trader Joe’s on a Sunday afternoon and the South Pasadena farmers market on Thursdays. I’ll miss Westridge’s sun-dappled walkways, the near-constant buzz of noise in the library, the stained glass windows in EC20. I’ll miss the Philz Coffee where I wrote my first Spyglass articles, the grubby neighborhood Little League field that is the site of some of my brother’s greatest glory, and even—grudgingly—the glory of weather that is 72 and sunny day after day.

Maybe it’s not so bad after all.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m still excited, over-the-moon excited for the snow and the seasons and the scent of pine needles. Excited for new coffee shops, new friends, new everything. Excited to be cold and far and a little bit lost.

I still want to go far, far away from here. Coastal Maine is calling my name, and I couldn’t be more thrilled or eager to hurry up and answer. But now, I finally know and (kind of) love what I’ll be missing.