I have been away from the Atlantic for three months, and I don't think I have ever missed the smell of seaweed and salty air this much.

I grew up in a town called Swampscott, Massachusetts. It's located just 20 minutes north of Boston along the North Shore, a small town where you know everybody, and everybody knows the beach. And let me tell you, the past 18 years of my life have revolved around the beach.

At the age of five, summers were spent ordering pizza to Preston Beach as the sun set and the muscles in our little sunburned bodies were aching for a break from the endless supply of waves and water games. At 10, winters were spent trekking down the hill in the middle of blizzards to see those persistent seagulls still soaring while the waves looked angrier than we had ever seen them before.

Everything in between was made up of daily beach walks with Mom when she would shout up the stairs from the kitchen while dinner was cooking with, "Want to take a break from that homework and get some air?" or just taking some 'me time' and heading down during low-tide with my kindle to read in silence (well, its not necessarily silence with seagulls squawking and waves crashing, but you get the idea).

The beach was always a part of everything I did. It is where I learned that barnacles will leave you covered in band-aids if you step on them wrong and that snails will dance out of their shells if you hum them the right song. It is where mermaids existed and tide pools were a place you could waste hours wrestling to pick up crabs. The beach was a place to build bonfires and make s'mores, meet up with the boys in middle school when your parents thought you were all at a friends house for a sleepover, and the perfect location for senior skip day as a final 'thank you' for holding all the memories and moments that shaped the past 18 years.

Throughout all the craziness that was growing up, the beach was always a constant. It was always in the same place, with the same rocks and the same waves. It was predictable when friends weren't, and it felt freeing when everything else seemed to be crashing down around me. Life can make you feel so inside your head at times but standing at the shoreline and looking out at endless sea puts it all into perspective. In that moment, when it all feels like it's too much and you can't handle it, that's when you gulp in that salty air, dig your toes in the sand, let the freezing water wash over your feet and remember that if those waves can keep coming back, so can you.

So thank you, beach, for being something that I can always come back to, no matter how much I've grown.