Howdy.

How have you been?

I’ve been packing for New York (!!) and mentally preparing for another birthday.

Each year, on the day before my birthday, I reflect on what the past year has meant. It always turns out as a love letter of sorts to all of the good and all of the ugly. I think about those things and what they gave me, what that year gave me, and then I write it down. This year, I’m writing it down here. Part of that process is always looking back on the journal entries of that year, so I’m putting some of those here too. From me to you, this has been twenty. Forgive me, it’s quite jumbled and messy and raw, but so was twenty. I’m okay with that. I hope you are too.

KISSING GHOSTS IN GRAVEYARDS

This first one comes from last August, just after my twentieth birthday. It’s about reuniting with my high school soul mate in a graveyard, years later, and realizing that some loves, no matter how grand, have expiration dates.

We met on the first of August the morning after you landed. We drove to Cabrillo and sat in the grassy cemetery overlooking the ocean and I remember feeling like I was in the sky. There was nothing in sight except water and atmosphere and it all felt so infinite. But there you were next to me and your hand was rubbing my back and you had this smile on your face that made me feel like I probably should have been smiling like that too. But instead, my body seemed to shrink away from your touch. And when you kissed me, when our lips finally touched after all of the times they failed to at sixteen, I felt death rotting in the space between us. I must have looked like a ghost the way I stared out at nothing for all the moments that came after. You asked me how I felt and I said calm. This was true. All at once and out of nowhere came a calmness that I had not known for all the time since loving what we were.

But you just kept saying all of these things. You wouldn’t stop saying things, calling me your Aphrodite, telling me that we were connected. And I said nothing at all. Every time I looked into your eyes I recoiled. Do you know what that’s like, to be lying next to someone who loves you with everything that they have and to not feel anything at all anymore? It feels unfair that we live in a world where that can happen. That’s all I kept thinking about. How cruel it felt. When we said goodbye you told me you loved me. You shouted it across a parking lot and I just stood there staring at you for a moment. I just stared blankly and then I turned and walked away without saying anything at all.

One day later I called you with my toes dangling in the pool and told you with a shaking voice that I did not feel the things that you did. I remember looking at the call log and feeling underwhelmed when it only read seven minutes at the end of it all. Seven minutes is all it takes to break a heart. I remember that feeling cruel. But then came liberation. The kind that you forget exists until you feel it. I wore a summer dress and bought fresh vegetables at the farmer’s market and felt so free. I had shed the final skin of my adolescence and emerged in the world as someone new. All at once I became untethered from the weight of our story. I think I maybe did love you at one time when we were very young and very innocent and there lived enough space between us to construct mansions of metaphors. We were Rome, we were the multiverse theory, we were on a battlefield with exploding stars. But none of those things were real. They only existed within that space. And when you kissed me, there was nowhere left for them to breathe. There was just you and I. And that should have been better than all of those things, but it wasn’t. And I am so sorry that it wasn’t. Grief did not escape me when all of those metaphors died. But they live in the past with the people we were and the places we existed within. That’s where they belong. So this is, and I am sure of it now, the end of our story.

AUGUST 2022

This is interesting to me because at the time, the fact that we were in a graveyard was not strange. It was where we used to go in high school. But now, looking back, it’s so symbolic. The corpses six feet under were not all that had rotted. We too had gone to a war and we too had died there. So we went to the graveyard because it was our place. But at twenty, it was just an endless array of death stretched out before us. We were surrounded by ghosts, none more prominent than our own. I learned how to let us die that day. I learned how to let something that was once so alive, rest in peace. And that, as it turned out, was just the beginning of a long year of learning that sometimes, you have to let go of things that shine beautifully on paper, but lack all luster in the light of day.

FEELING 20

This next one is from November. The November that I sat in British Lit on Tuesdays and Thursdays at two p.m and watched the palm fronds tap against the window panes as I tapped my foot against the floor, listening to The Fray and waiting for class to start. It was discussing Dickens and Zadie Smith one moment and rushing out the very next to check my hair and meet some boy for coffee that would roll into a dinner that would roll into the next four months of our lives. Here is an entry from the first of those four months.

Like a prayer answered, November blew in with cold winds that chilled me to the bone as I sat reading and drinking a coffee that was struggling just as mightily to stay warm. My eyes watered from the dry air and my knuckles radiated a rosy glow. I met someone for more coffee after class on a date that rolled into dinner and walked endless blocks just to keep the conversation going. He carried a book and told me about the Zadie Smith novel that he loved and I found these things to be extraordinary. To sit in a sushi bar with a guy and talk about real things and to laugh when the guy making the sushi over hears your conversation and begins to laugh himself, to stand on a street corner in the dark with someone that you might actually like—these felt like moments of being twenty. I felt twenty tonight. Which is to say, I felt some other way than I ever did at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

NOVEMBER 2022

I love this because I have seen the end of that story now, but this day and how I felt on it remains fossilized in amber to me. It was perfect. And it was, quintessentially, twenty.

LESSONS IN SELF-LOVE, NEEDING OTHERS, AND GIRLHOOD

Also quintessentially twenty, were the realizations that I began to have about self-love, letting people in, and the aftermath of girlhood. Here are a few scattered thoughts on those.

Self-love was picking up a lot of steam when I was around sixteen, and I latched right onto it. I thought it was harmless. But I think I misunderstood some things. I aimed my efforts at loving myself and knowing myself so deeply that I could dream of someday in the future when I would be good enough at it to be rewarded with the love of someone else. And don’t get me wrong, loving and deeply understanding who you are and what you want are extremely important. They are the central pursuits of life to which we are never done exploring. But to tell a 16-year-old she must master them before anyone will love her is like telling her to understand the complexities of the world before allowing her to explore it.

I have learned that self-love is like any love and that it ebbs and flows. It can be gone all night in there in the morning. It’s never done. You never reach a point where you just totally love everything about yourself forever. If you did, you would stop growing. For all of my adolescence I was convinced that self-love was something I could, and needed to, master. It’s clear to me now that this was deeply flawed reasoning. For it implied that I was not yet deserving of what I wanted most—love. It implied that I needed to reach a certain state of being before I could experience the things I dreamed of. It never occurred to me that love is not a reward. That love has the power to heal. That broken people fall in love all of the time and that sometimes it is only love that can save them. I used to think that this was unhealthy. I thought that it was weak and dangerous to need someone else to help you, for what would happen if they left? I believed that I was the only one who could save me and I was wrong. We need people. They save us all the time and we save them.

I carry the trauma of girlhood with me like an extension of my own body. It lives inside of me. I can feel its pulse. To a young girl, the world is a battlefield and no matter how much your mother may try to protect you she will never be able to shield you from the minefield that is adolescence. You will get your heart torn out of your own body. You will watch blood trickle down your wrists in one long ruby river. You will learn things, internalize things, that no one can protect you from, especially not when you’re running headfirst into them in an effort to grow up. But that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how you grow and learn who you are. It’s also an experience of infinity, meaning, you don’t always feel the full force of it until you are twenty and trying to trust someone for the first time in years, realizing that that was an ability you didn’t know that you had lost. So I’m trying all of the time to unlearn what those years convinced me of.

DECEMBER 2022

These are all things that I have thought about quite a lot this past year. There was something about not being a teenager anymore that liberated me from all of the angst and problematic thinking that I had worn like a badge of honor. I remember feeling like it was suddenly not a cool thing to be so broken anymore. I started to actively overturn and unlearn the ideas that were hurting me. That has made up a lot of my twentieth year, and will invariably continue to be a part of the ones to come.

BREAKING UP WITH SOMEONE

These next entries begin at about the same time that this blog did. Meaning, technically, all that came after February is, for the most part, somewhere in the labyrinth of this blog. But here they are anyway.

To be a human being is to be completely shattered by someone and then one day find yourself shattering someone else. To have had my heart broken in the way that I did changed me any innumerable ways, but the one that stands out the most is the intimacy that I have with that pain. With what it feels like for someone to leave and never come back. To wake up in the middle of the night with chest pains to stand in front of the ocean and cry to feel so much pain that you think it will kill you. I thought it was going to kill me. So I know that pain like the back of my hand. And now, here I am knowing that there is no getting around having to inflict it upon someone else. Someone who did nothing but love me. He showed me something beautiful. He was a wonderful person. But that’s not enough. I’m choosing to let go of the toxic idea that good men are so rare. When you’re twenty it’s a very difficult thing to believe. When you’re twenty you’ve most likely had one too many abysmal encounters with your peers to believe in love and connection and the good of people.

It has come to my attention that this is a false belief. That you have to believe in people. That you have to allow them to be beautiful and good and decent and read good books and dress well and make you laugh. They must exist.

You think it’s cool to be the one who doesn’t care, who could take them or leave them, but it’s it’s not. It’s empty and hollow and lonely. The best thing that you could ever do is love. Once you spent four months not loving someone, to love someone it’s all that you want. I know that there is real love in this world. Real love that I have yet to find. So I’m walking away from something that wasn’t working in order to allow myself to find the thing that will. And that’s one of the best feelings that I’ve ever had.

FEBRUARY 2023

This was, perhaps, the single best moment of my twentieth year. Not only did it liberate me from that relationship, but it liberated me from the ideologies that I had subscribed to about love for my whole life. Up until this point, I still thought that it was cool to be the cool one. I can tell you right now, being the cool one sucks. It means you have no skin in the game. And what’s the point of that?

BEING HAPPY HERE

This one is from April, a heavy month usually weighed down by nostalgia. But I felt something else this year, something that struck me as I was driving home one day.

I want to dance on Saturns rings. I’m always wanting to be in places that don’t really exist, that are not really there. Maybe memories are like those rings in that way. There but not there

I had a thought yesterday that came fast and cool, like a gush of water over my heart. I was driving home in the late afternoon, listening to Santeria and smiling because we listened to it all the time that spring and those memories don’t hurt me anymore. They feel light, like the light that floated through that room and filled with dust as the golden hour lingered. I think that I am that light now. I am there and I am not there. I am silently illuminating beautiful and raw things, falling all over the scene. I can barely describe the relief and gratitude that I feel in finally feeling that peace.

But the thought was this: I was listening to that song and thinking about the spring and feeling the nostalgia for those golden-lit days when it dawned on me that my life is in such a better place now than it was then. Then, the pandemic had only just begun. I had only just begun to lose things, to watch them fall from my hands. I had yet to begin college and now I’m almost done. Now I am years older and wiser. I know heartbreak and loss. I know how to walk away. I know how to survive things. I know how to read and write at a level that I’ve never known before. I am less than a year away from moving to New York and starting my real adult life. I was so far from these things then. So it occurred to me that while I miss those days and how they felt, I would not want to go back to them for anything. I think that we are meant to move through our lives like that. Remembering the past but remaining devoted to the present and future.

APRIL 2023

I included this because that last part is the entire point of this birthday ritual. I sift through the past year, I remember it. I grieve it. And then, I let it go. I turn another year older. I write new things.

THIS WAS 20

But today, I’m writing this.

When I look back on this year, it comes to me in hazy hues of love. It was the first year of my twenties, the first year of truly coming to understand what all of those teenage years added up to. I learned how to walk away. I learned how to begin unraveling the damage that growing up a girl in the early 2000s did. I learned that there is freedom and peace in telling the truth to yourself and others. And within each of these things, there was love. Not the love that I dreamed of when I was fifteen, but the love that I desperately needed during those years. Twenty gave me that. Twenty also gave me a feeling of closeness to the life that I’ve always dreamed of. I always knew that I wanted that to be a writer in New York, but I didn’t know what or when that would look like. Creating this blog, and all of the unbelievable love and support that I have received through it, has made me feel like a real writer. It has allowed me to prove to myself that I can write ridiculous amounts of prose all week long and that that is, in fact, the only thing that I ever want to do. By this time next year, I hope to be in some cafe in Brooklyn, writing away. Twenty has given me the clarity and the confidence to see that.

But more than anything, twenty has given me back my inner child. I spent so much time running from the pure love for this world that I held as a kid. I stopped laughing. I stopped dancing. I stopped watching the sunset turn bubblegum pink and fall like dust upon the world. This past year, I’ve noticed that pink dust again. I feel more like I did all those years ago again. I feel like the grown up version of the crazy kid that I was. I feel like myself.

So this is to another year spent in this world. It’s been chaotically beautiful.

Love, m.

JOIN THE FUN

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.