I wake up cold and dizzy from the hardwood floor an hour after I fell asleep. My phone tinkles with the cheery tune of “Here Comes the Sun”, but the room is completely dark, the curtains only keeping out the light from the faraway city and the handful of stars still scattered across the sky.  I’d much rather stay under the covers and continue to rest. But I get up anyway. I’m lethargic and uncoordinated, a drunken ballerina in the dark, trying to get dressed and ready without waking my friends. Some have volunteered to go with me, and I see the way sleep still clutches onto their bodies as well, half-lidded eyes and lumbering legs. When we finally all make it out onto the porch, the sky has gone pink with anticipation of the coming sun. I smile at the awe in my friends' faces. Sunrises are rare. You have to earn them. 

We pile in my car and head to the water. I wanted to experience the ocean personally, to try and connect with it, to see what it stirred in me. But when we head to the beach, the parking lot is already crowded. It’s 6am on a Saturday and not at all what I expected. The sun is barely out yet, shyly peaking its head up from under the world’s covers, and casting a soft muted light on the water. And yet, so many people. Surfers bobbing up and down on the calm waves. A woman and her dog walking along the beach. And then the homeless people gathered on the sand, by the water, on the road. There’s a run down school bus with colored construction paper as curtains. I see a woman with a van for a home, unpacking her valuables on the lawn. Her skin is scorched, her hair is mussed, and her license plate is from Colorado. There’s license plates from South Dakota, Indiana, Arizona. People who came from all over, because the ocean called. People who stayed, living out of buses or vans or sleeping on the sand, chasing a dream perhaps, or to live without walls and only horizon. Looking at the waves I try to imagine that. The ocean has been a part of my home for so long, I can’t imagine having to chase it. 

When I walk into the water, it’s ice against my skin. Frigid in a way that burns. But I’ve never let that stop me before. Seaweed wraps around my legs, slippery and slimy, but I slide past it. I submerge, the cold punching the air out of my lungs, leaving me gasping for breath. I laugh into the morning air. How ridiculous I am. My friends wait along the shore, warm and dry. The surfers float on the water in their wetsuits, waiting for the waves. And then there’s me, alone in the water, hoping to find something. The sun rises above the houses, setting a path of glittering jewels on the water, and illuminating the waves, haloing them, right as they crest. It’s beautiful, startling so, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. 

The day goes on. There’s breakfast, tide pools, seals. People teaming at all of them. I wonder what lures people here, like the fisherman I see casting his line into unknown waves.

When we get to the ocean at sunset, I start to understand. The sea is orange and gold in the setting sun, and it goes out for what looks like forever, for what looks like infinity. There’s a vastness to it, a freedom to it, no confines and no barriers. Limitless. For me, my vastness starts at my fingertips and ends in my toes, my vastness is contained underneath layers of skin and blood and bone. I am limited, so limited, under the eyes of others, in my tainted perception of myself. 

I can see myself as a child, bounding into the water, being consumed by the salt and sea spray, and smiling as bright as the flash of summer sun on the water. Limitless. 

I dive into the water now. It’s cold, but in a way that excites the nerves. On the horizon, right where the sun has ducked under the water, there’s an ethereal burst of color, an aura of bright yellow fading into rich tones of orange. I swim out towards it, towards that radiance, that beauty that connects like a hook to my sunburnt soul, and drags me closer. My body disappears into the hues of gold, into the scintillating waves of warm reds and oranges. And suddenly I am no longer flesh and blood, and I dissolve into sea foam, into waves, into current. I let the ocean push and pull me, I allow it to flow in and out of me. 

The waves tumble me around. The sand scrapes my skin, scrapes off all the layers of me I’ve added to fit, and what is left is raw and vulnerable and true. What is left is me and the world.

I am limitless, my vastness stretches out of my fingers and goes out into infinity. My soul blossoms from out my chest, and swells and grows large in its freedom. I am a part of something bigger, a small ripple in a larger current, and I smile and laugh and I hear how it echoes against the waves, echoes through time. 

A year ago, my hometown burned down in a wildfire. I had just moved away, and in a blip of a day everything that I once knew was turned to ash. That year I learned loss, in more ways than one, and suddenly it felt like I had no more roots. I had nowhere to call home, little left familiar, and no place to surround me like I’m a missing piece. I was set adrift, with nothing to anchor me back down. 

But in the waves, in the aurora of the setting sun, I can almost see it, almost feel them standing right next to me. My childhood best friend diving under the water, pretending to be a mermaid, my brother and I racing across the sand with boogie boards trying to catch the best wave, playing in the seaweed with my middle school crush, and diving into the cold ocean at sunrise on a dare as a teen.

And as water softly pushes against me, my eyes start to water, because deep in my chest I experience a feeling I haven’t felt in a long, long time. Home. It hits me as hard as the waves slamming into me. Home. And maybe home was never my house, or the corner store, or the school where I learned to read and write. Because those are all gone now, but I can still feel it so strongly.  The smell of the air, the salt, the sagebrush, the sunbaked earth. The wind whipping through my hair, the saltwater on my skin, the sand soft and yielding beneath my feet. This is home, and it always has been.

 I have found what I’ve been looking for.

I stay in the water, until the sun is all but gone, and the water turns to silver around me. My friends still wait by the shore, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the horizon. Limitless.