Salt air
One moment, you are 18. Your hair is a few shades of purple. Your eyes brighter.
Your feet dig into the smooth sand of the beach as the sun slowly slips into the sea. It’s your graduation trip to Montemar. Beside you are the 20 people you’ve known since you were 6. Too young to remember how any of you first met. Too many years later to imagine what life might look like without them.
For over a decade, you’ve all laughed in hallways, bickered in classrooms, cried over lost PE games, whispered in cafeterias, and broken friendships only to sew them back together again. Few people grow up beside the same group for this long. Long enough that you’ve all been everything to one another. Friends. Enemies. First loves.
The first boy you loved is a few steps away from where you sit. Close enough to walk over to him if you wanted to. Far enough that all the years between you, the unspoken and spoken words, hang heavy in the air. You don’t really know how to cross that distance. But you know you could. He’s there. He’s always been there. In Valentine’s Day cards, plushies won at arcades, small pieces of jewelry once symbolizing belonging, now tucked in a box. At 18, that feels like something permanent.
You grab a handful of sand and let it fall gently. Grain by grain, it slips between your fingers, just as time is slipping now. Although the future still feels as distant as the setting sun.
You know, in that heavy part of your chest, that this cannot last forever.
Then the next moment, you’re almost 21, in a city that was supposed to be the beginning of something. Los Angeles. The City of Angels. The place you once dreamed about leaving Manila for.
Now you live here, confused about your feelings for a boy you didn’t even know existed a few months ago.
Meanwhile, the first boy you loved is 7,000 miles away. But the distance that matters isn’t physical. It’s the distance that lies in the realization that the people you are now are far from the kids you once were.
The contained and secure world you grew up in no longer exists. Emptied classrooms. Scattered friend groups. Childhoods packed into what are now just memories. And suddenly you are left with the task of assembling yourself again.
You try, of course. You search for belonging the way any other college student does. In clubs you join and leave. In majors you reconsider. In friends who come and go. In boys who seem, for a moment, like they might understand you.
In the two years you’ve been in Los Angeles, there were moments when you thought you found it. But you cannot shape new people and places into old memories. And after a few cuts and bruises and broken hearts, you slowly begin to realize that some things are meant to be chapters, not blueprints, and that belonging built only on effort was never meant to feel like home.
Los Angeles never quite becomes home. It’s the place you walk through, study in, spend most of the year in. A vast skyline you eventually stop comparing to Manila. One you recognize, perhaps have even grown to like, but never fully belong to. You move through it with caution and care, like someone staying over at a close friend’s house. It’s all familiar now, but it isn’t yours.
But maybe that’s the nature of this age. Maybe home is not always a place. Maybe it’s something that you carry deep inside you—the smell of salt in the air, the sound of waves crashing, the memory of the people you loved sitting a few steps away on the sand.
And maybe life is just this: a series of shores you pass through.
One moment, you are 18, standing on a beach you never want to leave. The next, you are 20, learning the only person you should belong to is yourself. And then somehow you are standing on another beach, writing this. Bali.
The sky fades from orange into violet, just like it did that night years ago. The air is laced with salt, a scent you once thought only belonged to the Philippines. You watch the tide roll in and out and realize how many versions of yourself exist here.
In the distance, you can almost make out the purple-haired girl you once were, grabbing and releasing sand, unaware that time slips out of your fingers in the same way. That love alone is not enough to make everything and everyone stay.
Across the ocean in front of you is the other girl, still searching for herself in classrooms, crowded parties, and in the temporary warmth of arms that don’t know how to hold her.
But standing here now is you. The one who knows something that neither of those girls could ever begin to understand.
That life does not stay still long enough for any one version of you to hold onto it.
And somewhere down the line, in however many years, there will be another shoreline.
Another you standing there.
And when she does, the air will smell like salt again.
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Cai Yambao, 20, was born and raised in Manila and is currently studying at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
