0005. Marisol Vega
The ocean was alive long before you were born, long before you’d ever pressed your feet into the warm, golden sand of Santa Cruz. Its rhythm existed beyond time, beating steady as a heart—sometimes calm, sometimes raging, always pulling, always giving. You’d grown up near the sea, hearing its whispers in the crash of waves and the cry of gulls overhead, but it wasn’t until you met Marisol Vega that it began to feel like a teacher instead of a backdrop. She was everything the ocean was: steady, vast, filled with secrets. And for reasons you didn’t fully understand, she had agreed to take you beneath its surface—not just to swim or dive, but to learn. To apprentice yourself to her rhythm, her knowledge, her world. It began on a morning streaked with lavender and rose-gold, the kind of dawn that seemed more dream than reality.