On August 28, I woke up at 5:37 in the morning and reached for a cup of water that wasn’t there. In its absence, where my bedside table and myriad trinkets always sat relative to me, I fumbled in the darkness and knocked a solitary lip balm onto the floor. Smooth, cheap wood replaced the cracked paint I had spent years sleeping beside; a Target stool instead of my great-grandmother’s nightstand under my fingertips. Where I expected to see my high school drawings taped haphazardly on the wall, moonlight filtered through dusty blinds onto the floor. In this unfamiliar dorm room, I had left the home I grew and nurtured for fifteen years for an attempted facsimile, this curated home of new posters and new blankets and resolutions to be a new me.
2,710.2 miles away and three hours ahead, the rest of my family was probably eating breakfast or getting my younger brother to school. For a brief moment, I allowed myself the luxury of reminiscence. I allowed myself the memories of rushed Monday mornings and my routine eggs and toast, of a softer mattress and sheets that had been washed hundreds of times, of the drive to school I knew better than the back of my hand. But I resolved to prevent melancholic ruminations from tainting a day that had barely even started. I got out of bed and walked outside.
On my residence hall’s balcony, I sat at a small white table with a journal and watched the sleeping world. From my vantage point, it was clear where the San Gabriel Mountains pierced the sky, the rock faces black and churning in the predawn darkness. They’d been there for millions of years, frozen in perpetual stoicism. And yet, despite the gaping distance in our respective chronologies, I felt their presence intimately, as we existed together in our tacit anticipation for sunrise. I imagined them sentient, I imagined them just as awestruck by their millionth sunrise as by their first. The chill in the air around me eased with the coming day, and with it any residual bitterness from my unfamiliar wakeup.
It was nearly an hour before sunlight began to peek over the horizon, a feather-light touch of salmon pink in the morning mist. A film formed over the landscape as the fog washed the mountains and my view of the village in a color at once vivid and muted, like a blinding vibrancy was concealed behind an almost-sheer curtain.
From where I sat, thick leaves of a large tree blocked direct sunlight and I was cast in shadow, only speckled with spots of sun. To my left, another tree stood halfway in the same darkness, and I wrote:
There’s a tree next to me that I can’t quite place. Small white-pink blossoms and equally delicate leaves, with narrow, gently angular branches and flaky bark. This tree is beginning to see the sunlight. It’s about to be split down the middle. … It’s about to become green and gold, dew and evaporating dew.
I know now the tree is a Crape Myrtle, but at the time it was nameless. It didn’t need a name to bask in daylight. It didn’t need a name to relish the coolness of dew in the shade. Half the Crape Myrtle existed in the burgeoning dawn, the other half rooted in night, but rather than two disjunct pieces they formed a cohesive whole. They’ve got the same roots, I thought. Maybe they’re not so far apart.
As the sun rose further, the mountains bathed in gold. The bare rock faces I saw an hour before were suddenly covered in greenery, less verdant after a brutal summer but so breathtakingly alive. Any mist that obscured my view in the past hour was gone; in its place, startling clarity. Having risen to a sufficient height, the sun was no longer interrupted and I was shrouded entirely in golden light. The Crape Myrtle’s halves reconciled; as it faced the sun its blossoms were uniform in the way their petals held the light, gently and softly. Together, the Crape Myrtle and the mountains and I welcomed unadulterated warmth with open arms.
I don’t have mountains at home. The highest point in my entire state is a paltry 345 feet above sea level, and the closest thing to a mountain in my neighborhood is a man-made hill that takes fewer than 10 seconds to climb, in a park 15 minutes from my house. Rather, proximity to the sea has been the constant defining feature of my home. Briny air on my tongue, the rhythmic waves on the shore, humidity heavy in my lungs: these are the trappings of home. And so many miles away from the ocean and even further from my own Atlantic, I had none of these tethers at my disposal anymore. So I turned to the sun, the mountains, and the Crape Myrtle and tried to find new ones.
The San Gabriel Mountains are growing at a rate of two inches per year, remarkably fast compared to counterpart ranges. They aren’t so still after all, more like slow waves than boulders. An ocean out my window, even all these miles away from the water. I like to sit and drink my tea with them on languid mornings, watch the California mountains echo the Atlantic Ocean. I’ll spend the next three years with them. We’ll grow together, and it will be enough.
