Paying Attention to San Diego

Illustration by Gina Ledor

“Don’t you think they’re maybe the same thing? Love and attention?”

-Lady Bird, Dir. Greta Gerwig 2017

So begins my five-month stay on the other side of California. Year one creating a new place to call home in a city the furthest I’ve ever been from home, except my eighth grade trip to the East Coast. I’ve lived in San Diego my whole life, spent my first nineteen years in the exact same house. Most of that time I was trying to get out, away from the familiarity I found myself relishing in my last couple of weeks. 

I’m not mushy for San Diego. I know its flaws just as well as its wonders. It’s because I pay attention that I can think back both fondly and bitterly on a hometown that is mostly desert and chaparral, beige-brown-gray dried life and charred land neighboring vast blue, rainbow city-street Hillcrest and the lazy skyline of a downtown where no one is in any particular hurry. 

Packing up my life during a pandemic seems like the most poetic place to start my remembrance. My goodbyes carried through digital spaces and six-foot divides, bouncing against stuffed IKEA bags as the half of the garage masquerading as my bedroom is leached of color. Racing to Berkeley against the clock ticking down the final hours of a horrific presidential administration, greeted with blazing sun and a swab up my nose. I wish I had brought less with me in that car. Some things belong back home. 

Home. I think it’s kind of crazy how we can feel so tied to a place we didn’t choose. There’s something so comforting in knowing San Diego will always be my hometown. In third grade, I remember marveling at Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. I thought, when you are the best at something, someone can always come around and beat you. That’s why being the first is better. San Diego and Sally Ride are lucky like that. San Diego, at least, is far from the best. 

I had a really happy childhood that came tumbling down Jenga-style around age thirteen. All my memories are there, made with friends I lost and then regained. Between the lap of lazy waves, I found time to get my first job writing, convince myself I could change the world, and fell in love for the first time. But waves break, and in my cookie-cutter neighborhood where you’re never more than five miles from one of the churches punctuating the streets, the sunshine didn’t spare me from cloudy days. School administrators told me I’d ruin my soccer coach’s life by reporting harassment. Most days I drove behind a pro-life riff on Horton Hears a Who plastered to someone’s bumper. Gentrification trickled down from LA, along with spray-tan vanity and the type of upper-middle-class kid who likes to cosplay as poor.

Southern California, I’ve found, is hard to love, but also hard to hate. There’s a sweet familiarity about home that always seems to direct my first thoughts to green cliffs overlooking the ocean and the feeling of hugging someone after a long time, a glaze over the bitterness of memories buried deeper. It’s hard to name exactly what I resented so much living in San Diego, a feeling that strikes me so clearly when I don’t have a keyboard at my fingers. Maybe it’s just cliche teen angst, or maybe it’s the constant smell of old money and military traditionalism, the performative political atmosphere that oozes along coastal California, and the fact that I could watch the land withering up as I grew up. It’s no Sacramento, but at times San Diego felt vaguely soul-crushing. 

But every time I felt like I was about to hit the ground, I’d smell the ocean air, see the painted houses in University Heights, or share a moment with a wandering cat on my way back to the car. San Diego is sand in my eyes at soccer tournaments and sand in my ears after laughing the night away at a bonfire. It’s where I threw up not one, not two, but three acai bowls into various private toilets and public trash cans and felt that bleary-eyed invincibility after stepping out of movie theaters with some of my favorite people. It’s a place where we often would say something like, “There’s nothing to do… wanna drive somewhere really pretty and just hang out?” as if that was anything close to a cruel existence. San Diego is a place where trees don’t grow much higher than people, except for the gnarled one at Balboa Park that’s now fenced off or the invasive eucalyptus who crash and fall during storms but leave earthy perfume in the air the next morning. It’s the dirt under my nails that I can’t ever fully scrape out. 

We’d go to that pretty place, and hang out. I guess what we were doing was paying attention. It’s both the most and the least that I can do.