Lately I have been returning in small accidental ways to pieces of myself I thought I had outgrown, and nothing brings that feeling more sharply than standing at the San Diego Skate Park watching these kids move across the concrete like the place belongs to them. The first time I held a skateboard I was too shy to admit I had no idea what I was doing, but the moment the wheels rolled beneath me something loosened inside. I was never good, not even close, but the act of trying made me feel part of a world that didn’t demand explanations. Seeing these kids now pulls that old sensation back with a weight I didn’t expect. The cracked surface of the bowl, the worn-out rails, the way the boards hit the ground with that unmistakable snap, all of it reminds me of afternoons when I chased a feeling I couldn’t name yet. I watch them as the sun stretches the shadows thin, and I recognize the reckless honesty of learning to move in a place that doesn’t forgive hesitation.
After years of drifting between responsibilities and the kind of adulthood that eats away at spontaneity, being here makes the present slow down in a way that feels almost physical. San Diego’s heat settles on everything, softening the edges of the park, and I catch myself scanning the lines of the bowl the way I used to, tracing imaginary paths I never mastered. Back then I was the girl who scraped her knees more times than she landed anything, but I kept showing up because there was something addictive about the noise and the rhythm, the simple ritual of stepping on the board and pushing forward. Watching these kids drop in without thinking stirs an ache I didn’t expect. They remind me of who I was before fear became something I measured instead of ignored. The skatepark holds that strange mixture of grit and release, a place where kids build their own version of freedom with wheels, momentum, and stubbornness.
Certain moments catch me off guard, like the way a boy pauses at the top of a ramp with the exact look I used to have when I convinced myself I could do something I had no business attempting. He leans forward, commits, disappears into the curve, and for a second I feel the drop in my stomach as if it were happening to me. I was never brave in the obvious sense, but skating gave me tiny windows of courage that stitched themselves into my memory. It didn’t matter that my tricks were clumsy or that my balance betrayed me more often than not. What mattered was how the board made me feel capable of slipping out of the roles everyone expected me to play. Standing here now I sense how much that mattered, how much it still does. The kids don’t know it yet, but this concrete holds pieces of their future selves, the ones who will look back and realize that these afternoons shaped them quietly.
There is something grounding about watching a community form without ceremony. Groups gather by the benches, others line up near the ramps, and the whole scene hums with a kind of shared understanding that doesn’t need words. I used to love that unspoken bond, the way we gravitated toward anyone holding a board because it meant they understood the unwritten rules of persistence falling getting up and trying again. At San Diego Skate Park that feeling is alive in every corner. Kids laugh when someone lands a shaky turn and they laugh louder when someone falls, not out of mockery but out of recognition. I remember wanting exactly that a space where my awkward edges didn’t feel out of place. Watching them now I realize how much that longing shaped my sense of self and how skateboarding offered a simple way to exist without needing to prove anything beyond the willingness to try again.
Standing there with the fading light brushing the mountains in the distance I feel the years between then and now collapse into something I can finally hold. The woman I am has learned caution patience a kind of carefulness that comes with surviving too many responsibilities, yet the girl I was resurfaces every time a kid glides across the bowl with that raw immediacy only youth knows how to carry. I thought growing up meant leaving that part of me behind, but watching them reminds me that she never went anywhere, she just learned to stay quiet. The skatepark breathes life into her again, reminding me that even imperfect attempts mattered because they built a version of myself that didn’t depend on success to feel real. As the wheels keep rolling and the night settles in I understand that the connection between my past and these kids is not nostalgia alone. It is the recognition that motion has always been my way of staying alive even when I had no idea where I was going and watching them carve through the San Diego dusk makes me grateful that the world still leaves spaces where that feeling can survive.
*All photographs and content used in this post are my own. Therefore, they have been used under my permission and are my property.*****Bold
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