Note from the Borderline #2

On 29.

Birthdays are cursed. Doomed to unmet expectations of self.

And I’m at that tender age where I feel like things should be different. Like I should be in love and that love should somehow have made my posture better by now. And like I should be able to say “I know where I’m going, or at least have a vague idea” instead of “I know the name of every housewife from every franchise.”

Sometimes I dare to open the sad little trinket box in my brain where I’ve stored the version of myself I would have liked to be by now, and I’m so impressed with her. She decided to pursue opera when she was 15 like her voice teacher told her to because she wasn’t uncomfortable in her body while performing. Or she read a lot more books and looked at a lot more of the good parts of Twitter and never burned a social bridge so that she could write little fluff pieces about the internet, the way she liked. Or she shed abusive relationships the minute she realized they would drag her down much faster than she could ever pull them up.

Then I close it and go back to feeling like a little bruised fruit in a grocery store.

I really can hardly believe I’m 29. Mentally, I’m the same age I was when the pandemic began: 26. The greatest of time thieves. The years are so muddy to me because that’s just what they have been — pure mud. I have a theory that for most people it either accelerated or decelerated their personal timeline. We can guess where I fell. You know those dreams where you’re desperately trying to accomplish something basic, but you can barely get your eyes to open and your head is somehow on a swivel? Yeah.

If anything, this age has revealed to me the tragic importance I ascribe to the most minute decisions. I’m not a fatalist, (prefaced every fatalist ever before they said something earnest about fate), but I’ve started to understand the opportunity cost of making tiny choices. As small as a left turn vs. a right, as consequential as a night spent in consuming my usual media vs. a night outside of my apartment. Seen this way, the potential for wrong decision-making is amplified. Or rather, it feels like I’m constantly screwing with what could have been my fate. Which I guess is, in fact, my fate. In any case, these choices, big and small, all feel like stones I’m adding to my pockets before the plunge. It sucks.

For this simultaneously overripe and raw year I’m entering, I hope for only one thing: happiness. I hope it finds me when I most expect it, as opposed to the other way around. Wish me luck.