 But what about us? We've always had parents. We didn't have we we lost it until you came to Castle Black. We got it back last night. Used in the same West Egg of Long Island that Fitzgerald used as the backdrop for the Great Catsby. The Bay has been my backyard and New York City, which was always just a short train right away, was a playground. But like many kids who dream of leaving their hometowns for college and building new lives elsewhere, I wanted to leave and when I got into Cal and decided it was where I wanted to go to college, I really had no reservations about moving across the country. I had never been homesick when I left home before and I had truly no doubt that it would be the same this time around. I believed that I had simply outgrown New York. Outgrown the version of me who lived there and was fully ready to embrace a new version of me and a new city with new people. And then the world stopped. The COVID-19 pandemic rendered people in quarantine. It put a halt to my plans like it had for virtually everyone else in the world. And despite believing that I would always head off to college after graduating from high school, I'm still sitting in New York, taking classes over Zoom. And like a lot of kids who stayed home this semester, I live in a weird state of limbo where I know that I've started a new chapter of my life, but it doesn't feel like it. I know that it's November 15th, but it still feels like March 259th because it feels like the college dream that's been romanticized for me is starting without me. And I have to watch from afar other kids getting to start over in a new town in a new city with new people the way I had wanted to for so long. But I think even now I don't know how I wanted my life to start over when it hadn't even really begun. Gen Z kids are masters at delayed gratification. Masters of the- I won't sleep for this entire week and it'll pay off when I get a good grade on the test that I'm studying for. Masters of the- I'll push myself past my breaking point for every single day of high school to get into my dream college. Masters of the- I'll be happy after this. I'll be satisfied after this. Without knowing that it sucks to live your life that way. It sucks to not find joy in your day to day and it will break your heart living for an estranged non-guaranteed tomorrow. I hesitate to take life lessons away from our global pandemic, but if anything I know that I have an outgrown New York or New York City and that in actuality it's virtually impossible to. If you live in a densely populated city, you'll know that your backdrop is forever changing. The restaurants you love as a kid will go out of business and you'll find new ones to love. The movie theater you went to on your first date will close down and become something else. Your neighborhood and your city will evolve constantly and rapidly and if you cannot keep up with it, it will leave you behind. I resented my hometown in New York City for years because I wholly believed I had outgrown them and it's only now, a few months before I leave for Cal Spring semester, that I realized that it has outgrown me, that I could not keep up with its rapid evolution and instead shrunk back into a person who believed her growth was destined for another time, for another city. It's not. There's nothing in the world like being a New Yorker. There's no sensation as surreal as standing in Washington Square Park with thousands of other New Yorkers as they sing and dance to YMCA on the day the 2020 election was announced. As surreal as watching people sing dancing queen from their fire escapes and dance in the streets, there is a subliminal piece in rowing boats at the pond at Central Park and watching children play with bubbles by Bethesda Fountain. There's a magic that exists when the leaves change color in the city and paint the whole having you golden. When you watch the Christmas spectacular and the Rockettes and wander through the city bathed in lights during Christmas time, there is no anonymity like that you feel standing at the top of the rock, watching the whole city from the clouds. It is imperfect and full of flaws and potholes and governments surveillance birds. There will be moments where the L train breaks down on days when you are on the brink of mental breakdown and you will hate it then. Hate it because it is imperfect and full of flaws in the same way that you are because you are the truest reflection of it and it is the truest reflection of you. Is this an incredibly long-winded explanation of why being from New York is a personality trait? Perhaps, but is it also my apology and love letter to my city? Also, perhaps. So I'll be back in New York and when I come home, it will be home.