It was a strange thing how quickly life with Ben started to feel normal.

Not boring normal. Not married-for-thirty-years normal. Just normal in the way a home starts to feel norm…

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March 2013

The sun was already up when we got home which meant we’d done it again.

Shoes by the door. Music still faint in my ears. My jaw sore from clenching too much. Ben disappearing into …

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That detail stayed with me - the warmth.

Like it had absorbed something while it was gone.
Like it knew more than I did of hands that were s…

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End of August arrived faster than I could see coming.

One minute I was still in Madrid, still wrapped inside that soft, golden bubble where life felt like a prolonged adult internship, …

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I didn’t know when I hugged him goodbye that this was the beginning of something that would rearrange my entire life.

We were standing outside the airport - fluorescent li…

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📍 Amherst, Massachusetts

If I’m being honest, coming home after Mexico felt like being put back in a box I’d already outgrown.

Not in a dramatic, “I’m too good for my hometown” way—more like… my body had expanded. My nervous system had expanded. My idea of what was possible had expanded. And then suddenly I was back in Amherst, walking into rooms where nothing had changed, even though I had.

Graduation happened in the technical sense—because I did the thing.
But the truth is: I had already graduated six months before any of them.

While everyone else was still trudging through senior year, I had been living alone in a foreign country, teaching myself Spanish one butchered sentence at a time, going to swanky international dinner parties, making friends from around the globe who taught me what mezcal was and why house music felt like hypnosis.

So yes—
I wore the dress.
I walked across the stage.
I got the diploma.

But it felt like returning to a movie set after you’ve already seen the ending.

In my journal a few nights later, I wrote:

“June 10th. I graduated the other night. I got to wear my pretty dress and walk across stage and get my diploma. It was weird seeing my graduating class because I haven’t seen most of them in months, but I guess it was good. Then I was supposed to go to this senior party, but I realized that I was way too tired and I actually wasn’t really friends with anyone.”

Iconic. Brutal. Honest. Also… so me.

And yes—reading that back now, I want to hug her. Because there’s a very specific loneliness that comes from outgrowing a life before anyone else notices you’ve left.

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If I think about who I was at seventeen, I have to laugh a little.
Not because I was naive - actually, the opposite.
I was the kind of girl who could land in a foreign country with nothing but a backpack and a good feeling in her chest and somehow stumble directly into her destiny.

I knew nothing… and I knew everything.

My intuition was feral then - not refined, not strategic, not softened by time.
It lived in my body like a creature with its own pulse.
A whisper telling me:
go here,
walk there,
say yes,
try it,
run toward it.

And I always listened.

I followed it to Mexico.
I followed it onto the ferry to that tiny island.
I followed it barefoot out to the volleyball courts the day I met him — not because I knew what was coming, but because something in me was already moving toward him long before I understood why.

Did I sometimes confuse intuition with chaos?
Absolutely.
My discernment was still in the womb.

But God, I admire that girl.

The world was her oyster and she acted accordingly.
If there was something she wanted, she found a way to get it - and most of the time, she did.
She was a force. Not because she tried to be, but because she simply didn’t know any other way.

And she had no idea - none - that the boy she was about to write about in her journal would become one of the great loves of her life.

This is where it began.

The Boy on the Beach

I was seventeen, a senior in high school, and absolutely miserable with my current circumstances when the idea of leaving to Mexico first came to me.

Senior year is supposed to feel like a victory lap, but mine felt like trying to breathe in a room with no windows. Everything was too familiar, too predictable, too… small. I remember sitting in class one afternoon, listening to my teacher drone on about hematology, staring at a poster of a rainforest someone had pinned to the wall, thinking: There has to be more than this.

Then I learned something no guidance counselor had ever bothered to mention: you don’t actually need all of senior year to graduate. By the end of first semester, you’ve basically met the requirements.

The rest is just bureaucratic performance.

That was all the permission I needed.

I gathered every dollar I’d earned from my part-time high school job - weekend shifts, holiday rushes, babysitting tips - and instead of putting it toward prom or a car or college deposits like everyone else, I bought myself a plane ticket.

The kind of plane ticket that pointed to the edge of the map.

Mexico.

I didn’t ask permission.

I didn’t hesitate.

I had hunger.

I had intuition.

And I had a seventeen-year-old girl’s belief that adventure was as valid an education as anything I could learn sitting in a classroom with flickering lights - something I still stand behind.

San Miguel became my first almost-adult life.

I volunteered at a daycare, learning Spanish one mispronounced word at a time.

I walked to a local gym every morning like I lived there for years.

I took myself to dinner alone beneath string lights, feeling bold and worldly in ways only a teenager far from home can.

Every morning I bought tamales from the same abuelita - partly because they were delicious, partly because buying them made me feel like a local contributing to the eco system.

So when Semana Santa arrived and the daycare closed for the holiday - Bri and I suddenly had a week wide-open. No obligations, no rules, no parents - it felt natural, inevitable even, to book a last-minute escape to the beach.

We did not research anything. We barely knew where the island was. I’m pretty sure we looked at a map, found the nearest coastline - and pressed ‘search’.

We packed backpacks, laughed the entire taxi ride to the airport, and boarded a Mexican airline like two girls who believed the universe would handle the details.

We were seventeen.

That was reason enough.

When we landed in Cancún, the heat slammed into us like a wall. And so did the people.

Hundreds of sunburnt Americans holding neon margaritas, dancing in the airport parking lot, wearing bead necklaces and Spring Break shirts. Bri, with her perfect Argentine Spanish from living in Buenos Aires for ten months, leaned forward and asked the taxi driver:

“Is there some kind of soccer tournament happening here?”

The driver blinked once, then burst out laughing.

“No, chicas… es Spring Break.”

We dissolved into hysterics.

It made the adventure feel even more like something we were stumbling into - the exact kind of thing that happens when you’re seventeen, fearless, and slightly delusional.

By the time the ferry pulled into Isla Mujeres, the sky was sherbet orange, and the air was thick with salt and possibility. I felt something lift inside me the moment we stepped onto the island - like my body recognized a place my mind had never been.

I didn’t know it yet,

but somewhere on that island was the boy who would shape the next two years of my life.

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