Springtime in October

First, a meditation on codependency:

You never really expect to find yourself hunched over on a bathroom floor, still half-wearing a tweed suit, now coiled around your neck and throat, phone in hand, with vomit prodding at the base of your tongue. You never really thought that things would look like this.

There comes a point in your life when you need to admit that if you never loved somebody properly from the start, you can't love them now. You can't flail your arms around in the arid sand, watching it heave and collapse over the anxious animal of your body. You can't then pretend to be an hourglass and shatter unexpectedly. You can't promise to be microwave-safe and then gild your edges with gold leaf.

Sometimes humans will do anything to shave down a square block to fit into a round hole. "There, there, that's the life I want!" The car I want to drive, the people I want to love, the grades I want to get. And then you're spending the last few months of being 19 drinking white wine alone in a Japanese restaurant as the radio drones on, reading the book you promised you'd check out only to hate it, bringing a sketchbook everywhere like a little magician intent on surprising the public.

But nobody is there to be seen. The band keeps playing, the dancers spin slowly in the gentle floodlights. There are two chessboards— the fold-out one on the bar table surrounded by $9 iced teas, and the one you gave him when it was all crashing down. Move the pawn to E4. He's alone. He didn’t need to take two steps forward, but now it’s up to the world and up to strategy.

I want to write to myself: You’ll spend the first few months of 19 expecting the world, drowning in material excess. You'll feel the need to buy something each week just to stare at and admire. You'll treat people like this too, like they don’t really exist in a way that matters. You'll call yourself a psychopath because it's more convenient than admitting that you're scared.

You'll spend the last few weeks of 19 watching the waves crash at the shore at 10 pm. You'll look out at the ever-so-bright city and wonder if you know anyone who's there right now. You'll go into that dazzling city and listen to jazz, buy pastries, wear argyle socks, and introduce yourself to strangers. You'll stand in tall grass and fix your eyes on the Milky Way. You never wanted to be this small. But you love it.

I don’t doubt that things will go a little better for me once I'm in a place where I have some common ground with people. Psychology research, maybe. Running a student magazine, even more maybe. I feel that terrible bile rising again when I think about my online presence. But as I said to my youngest brother, I like sharing what it is like to be alive. I like knowing about the world and about everyone from my past, present, and future. I just have to be healthy about it.

Springtime in October:

Tomorrow, I’ll be 20. It’ll be a new year in more than one way. The slate of the previous decade is cleanly swept and silently respected like a dirty grave. There will be roses on the bedside and cake sleeping soundly in the fridge. We won’t go to the beach if it rains; we might get Chinese food like New Yorkers do during moments like this. I’ll tell people online: I exist, I exist, I exist. I want a birthday wish in whatever form it comes. I wish you could tell me happy birthday in a way that mattered, but I don’t know if you can anymore.

That’s the pain of it all—aging, and having each molecule of your being shift slightly leftwards into the big maw of the universe. Wanting to read about trauma all over again. Talking to your mum about her childhood without it becoming an argument. Hiking in the forest and tearing up as the sun kisses you in the late afternoon. Remembering your old teachers. Remembering how hard you’ve been on yourself. Writing a blog entry.

What do I hope 20 looks like for me? Well, I’m not really scared of character development. I want to meet new people more than anything— for artistic purposes, and also because I think the people in my life who know me don’t want me to know them. I reject one-sidedness. I am a person, just like you. I want to meet kind and busy scientists in white lab coats, peppy artists with sketchbooks on their hips, older writers who ask about my work and show me theirs. I want to watch dumb superhero movies because I like one of the actors. I want to be pretentious and inhale life like a great big cloud of vanilla smoke.

I want to meet the psychology students who didn’t even think this is what they wanted. I want to meet the researchers who know they moved the world so minutely but still felt it shift under their toes. I want to get to know the wildflowers better. The seaside better. I want warm espresso in a diner and a new, crisp sketchbook. I want to be so kind that it overflows and spills like milk on a tiled kitchen floor.

For 20, I say, enough of me. But I will continue to be me in that sort of secondary way. I will do my tasks, and do them well, and let people know I’m open to collaboration. I’ll take care of my skin, exercise, keep my head high. Engage in hobbies, bake, hike, write the way I’ve always wanted to write. But when I see people, I want to offer them everything I can. I’m not scared anymore. I want to tell you how interesting you are. I want to ask where you’ll go and what you want. I want to collect stickers for my penpals so I can say I know just a little bit about life in Scotland and Germany.

At 17, I was tired. At 18, I was anxious. At 19, I was hopeful. At 20, I’m ready.