Twenty-one today.

Here is something of how that feels.

JULY 19, 2023

Twenty-one today. By the time that you are reading this, I will be on a plane flying high above this world. But today, I am drinking rosé and listening to Suki Waterhouse and feeling the utter strangeness of time. But also, the joy of it. I am so thrilled to be another year older. To have another year of love and life and learning under my belt. I think that’s cool. I wish that everyone did. Maybe then we could stop pretending that youth is peak of life. But that’s another story.

Today is about twenty-one, and twenty-one feels big. Twenty-one is graduating college and moving to Brooklyn. Twenty-one is red wine and G&Ts in grungy bars and rooftop gardens. It’s remembering being sixteen, sitting cross-legged on bedroom floors, sharing bottles and secrets all night long as the waves crashed just down the street. It was feeling that dizziness for the first time and thinking that you might never come down from the clouds. It was drinking a gallon of water for every sip of poison because you had never had a hangover before, but you were pretty sure you didn’t want one. And now look. The drinks aren’t from sketchy, miscellaneous bottles anymore. They’re all glossy and pricey and elegant now. They don’t have sandy hair or bare feet anymore and they aren’t home-brewing sangria in their closets for their mothers to find. They’ve grown up. How’d that happen?

This makes me sound like quite the alcoholic. I can assure you, I am not. I don’t even really like drinking that much, but I suppose a few years on a college campus will do that to you. You either come out of that world as an alcoholic or a puritan and I fell right into the latter. My older brother is always teasing me for my low drinking tolerance, saying that I’m not going to make it out there.

But regardless, let this year be filled with love and healing and joy. I’m going to meet interesting people and read breath-taking books. I’m going to bake chocolate chip cookies and and drink lot’s of coffee and think for a long time under a blue sky. I’m going to run around the city streets and watch rain pour down coffee shop windows and smile at the on-goings of this world with a pen in my hand. I’m going to fall in love with something every day, even and especially if that something is just the way that the sunlight is pouring down the city streets at four p.m.

For celebratory purposes, this post is cut brief. I have to go sit on my suitcase and pray that it closes. Then, I’m going to cook a fun dinner with my family and legally toast to twenty-one. A homemade pumpkin pie, yes pumpkin pie, is chilling in the fridge, waiting for birthday candles and a wish. Then, at the crack of dawn, I’ll get on a plane and fly to New York to run around art galleries and subways stations in outrageous outfits by day and drink martinis by night while watching the city come to life.

Talk to you then.

Oh, and cheers.

Love always, m.

JOIN THE FUN

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