Marin
I wrote the following - months ago.
Upon visiting family and friends in my hometown, Marin.
In my hometown, I’ve become a ghost.
I float by homes, bars, restaurants I used to haunt. I pass by versions of myself I no longer recognize. Distant memories of friends - from long before. Each giving rise to phantom memories I'd long since buried. Burned. Eight years gone, and I'm neither arriving nor departing—just lingering, wading into waters I once called home.
I found my sense of self outside its borders, but within the county’s limits, I’ve always felt confined. I’m untethered from person, place, or thing. The buildings, bars, and gyms are gone — every artifice that once gave shape to my former life has vanished. No one I’ve slept with in this town remains.
Marin sleeps quietly, rests expensively, and wakes each morning impossibly beautiful. My friends remain. Some expecting. The seasons shift. I come and go. The entirety of my life is in transit - everything around me feels static.
This Sunday, we’re going to the Headlands.
To visit a long, jutting cliff that has become sacred—a rugged, majestic stretch of land that rolls defiantly from the coastline. Awe-inspiring. Cut from a mass of rock that refuses to fall in line.
This cliff is dear to me.
It’s where we spread my mother’s ashes.
Now, my grandmother has passed, and she too will be laid to rest there. These hills hold my family. These hills - hold painful memories. The hills are impossible to escape.
But every place holds meaning: the parks I grew up in, my grandmother’s house. Sausalito - where my mother passed. Her ashes, floating out to the sea. Tiburon - the sea wall, 45 Beach Road.
My sister lives here, my brothers, my aunt too.
Only a few things endure:
Mt. Tam. The high school parking lot—where I first smoked pot. My grandmother's cold, dank, green lagoon. The familiar chill of a Sausalito afternoon. The leathery shell of a haas avocado, peeling away to ripe flesh. The fog - tumbling, rolling through Tennessee Valley. Seeping through and flooding its trails.
Haunting — its beauty.
The Sand Dollar — just over the hill. Garlic and butter.
Oysters. My mother adored them.
My youth—hazy now, rudderless, marked by time. Shapeless. Meatballs the size of fists—Shark’s Deli died a long time ago.
Time collapses here. One minute, I’m twelve, shagging flyballs in the outfield. The unkept grass- my brothers — Strawberry Field.
The next, Tej is a dad. Everyone’s moved on, while I keep searching.
I should’ve known. Whatever I was here - died a long time ago.
I’m 34, and still speaking of Marin as though I never left. Tomorrow, I’ll be 35— gone and I’ll miss it even more.
I think about the Poonians—and what my life would be without them. Jeevan’s, Tej’s parents—my adopted family. I’ve spent more hours, shared more meals in their home than in any home I’ve ever lived.
Marin: I’m indebted to the village that raised me.
My relationship to Marin has evolved over the years. I used to return only after much trepidation—fearful, unsettled by how a physical place could so easily resurrect buried grief. Marin long reminded me of losing my mother to cancer. I placed distance between us—Marin and me—as though crossing county lines might finally free me from the past.
Marin is also my saving grace.
Often, I’m left in awe of its beauty—the rolling hills, the winding trails that lead everywhere and nowhere all at once. The boats floating on the bay. The earth beneath my feet, the same ground that carried me, that transformed me into a runner. My favorite part about Marin is the land—sacred, awe-inspiring, and alive. The land that offered shelter—reprieve—when my home and family felt broken.
When my mother had just passed away, I was in college—drinking myself to sleep, weaponizing my prescription medications to fuel my highs and numb the lows. I was on the brink of rehab. Instead, I moved back to Marin. Marin took me in. In the midst of my spiral, it was Marin that soothed me. It offered a bed, a haven. When I was broken, Marin became the bedrock on which I began to recalibrate my life.
The most consequential chapters of our lives often come into focus only in hindsight. We can’t fully understand the wisdom of perspective until we’ve lived through entirely new versions of ourselves—until we’ve bled, mourned, and shed who we once were. Each time I return to Marin, I see more clearly the person I used to be.
Marin runs through Mt. Tam’s shoulders, winding down to Stinson Beach, brushing the edges of the Golden Gate. It lingers in the meadows, in the grasslands of Bolinas.
To a degree, my heart will always be in Marin.
There I am at ten, riding in our big blue Chevy Suburban.
I’m on top of Mt. Tam, driving with my mom. The Counting Crows are playing—A Long December. The sun is fading, the sky a soft orange. The wind is brisk, cutting.
If I am to be buried, bury me there.
Marin returns to me when I stand atop a vista in the Andes, gazing into a sky that never ends, that never settles. I contemplate - where I was from.
Where I’ve been.
Marin brings joy—and pain. I left at twenty-six, and every time I return, I feel just slightly out of place As if I no longer belong, or am searching for something it could never offer me.
Marin and me, the two of us unfolding on different axes.
The restlessness I feel today carries with it the unshakable knowledge that my life exists outside these county lines—past Sears Point, over the Gulf of Mexico, cascading down the Appalachians and into the sea. I suspect it lies in waiting, waiting to be found. It lies in hard to reach spaces, in between places.
Of who I am, and who I’m becoming.
In Yosemite - in half dome, on its granite face.
In Guatemala. Aside the base of a volcano. In the heart of a women, I haven’t met.
My life began in Marin—perhaps it will end here too.
But for now I am growing, still forming and writing. But I am compelled to leave. Tomorrow will come, and I will keep moving.
Pulled to explore — where the wild things are.
Under every rock and every tree.
I will leave behind my family who reside in these hills, my friends.
My memories.
Perhaps what I'm hunting for can't be found on a map. But rather the slow erosion of memory and time that was washed out to sea along with my mother's ashes. That I visit periodically - through photographs, Al Green's greatest hits. Anecdotes from family friends - from a bygone era
A family that never quite was, and a self I never got to be here—some of us gone, others no longer here.
Only through breath and reconciliation, through meditation, am I able to make peace with where I was from and who I became.
Marin — I love you.
You almost broke me.
You made me.
I’ll be back — one day.
There is a place up ahead.
I am going — I must.
I insist.
From this county, I come.
From this county, I remain.
Besos,
Enrique
RIP sharks deli