A shore with no footprints in it, which is the whole point

GRIP: Finance Intern at Stethy

Cover photo: Hiking in Australia’s Blue Mountains

There is a beach five hours south of Sydney where the sand is the whitest in the world. Somebody measured it. There is a number for it somewhere.

We got there on a Saturday with a sunburn on my neck and a work week still rattling around in my head. I walked along that snowy shore and the sand sang to me its quartz melodies. Then I sat down on a rock, body perfectly embraced by the sand beneath me, and watched the sun go down over the water. Its rays felt buttery and fat as they hit my face.

That was the crux of it. It was a week in, and I did not know anything about what came next. Everything felt infinitely unsure and still perfectly as it should be. I was doing nothing at all, and somehow everything.
Before that summer I had never really worked. Not the kind of work where the startup is actually counting on you and where 9am in the office means ten minutes before my supervisor – also known as 8:15am. It was my first step into a world of work and it was weird and hard. I was tired most of the time but restless and exploring all the while. I learned that tired and happy are not opposites.

The rest of it was another world.

I bartered for a cheap fishing rod and caught an eel as tall as me. We took a ferry out to a haunted island at midnight and walked around in the dark like we had any business being there. I bought a guitar at a pawn shop for thirty AUD. It was broken and needed the hand of a Penn engineer, and on the fourth of July the whole GRIP cohort sang around it, fixed, in a country where nobody cared that it was the fourth of July. Somebody even found a flag, and we wore it like a cape and paraded around the street. It was gorgeous.

I arrived shy. By August I was the most talkative person in any pub in the city. I would walk up to a table of men in suits and ask them what they did and how they got there, and they would tell me, and I would listen until they ran out of stories. A year ago that thought would not have been available to me. Not for one second. It simply was not in the catalogue of things I could do.

I do not think Sydney did that. I think leaving did. When nobody in a city knows you, there is no old version of yourself you have to keep performing. You find out what is actually in there. What was in there, it turns out, was somebody who wants to know people.

I look back and I cannot believe how many lives I lived this summer. Analyst on a Tuesday. Fisherman on a Saturday. Ghost hunter, guitar player, the loud American in the corner. All of it inside ten weeks.

The work taught me things I will use for years. The living taught me something I did not know I was missing, which is that I am not a fixed thing. I can be rebuilt. It happened fast, scarily so, and mostly because I was far from home and slightly out of my depth and too curious to be scared.

The sand is still down there, singing to whoever walks on it now. I am not the same person who sat down on that rock. I only worked that out on the train ride back.