I turn 22 this week.

And so, this is something of what 21 has been. Or, the year that felt like ten.

One year ago, I was packing for the last trip I would take to New York before moving here. I was sipping rooftop cocktails in the thick, summer air, feeling the full, unpredictable weight of the year that I knew was before me.

And what a year it turned out to be.

Such a year that, on one hand, I can’t believe that I am still 21. My life has changed more in the past twelve months than it ever has, making the collection of them seem longer than they were. I don’t quite feel 21 anymore. It has turned into a collection of moments that come to me like dreams.

A SERIES OF MOMENTS: 21

I am sitting in the back of a cab, feet aching, head spinning, as hot July air comes in through the window and I do nothing but stare out at the city lights, feeling all of the loneliness and all of the immensity of young adulthood reaching out for me. It grabbed my hand that night and it has not let go ever since. Your twenties are a strange, devastating, exhilarating, labyrinthian kind of deal, aren’t they? You can walk through them entirely alone and that is not something you have ever been able to say about any other decade of your life thus far. There’s something tender about that.

I am walking across my college campus, iced coffee in one hand and Shakespeare in the other. I sit down in the engineering quad where the nonsensical drum of mathematical conversation is so foreign that is is the equivalent of white noise, and read for the hours between my classes. Sally Mann’s Hold Still, Casey Gerald’s There Will Be No Miracles Here, some Didion here, some Vonnegut there. I will come to remember these hazy hours like dreams. They will come to me slowly, sweetly, like the golden light that fell down in sheets upon that campus all throughout that final, fall semester. They will feel like something that is never coming back. Something that was, long before nostalgia ever touched it, perfect.

I am hauling my bag full of books around that campus with Bon Iver and Rihanna, Mozart and The Fray in my ears. I am laughing with my professors over the absurdities of literature and how absolutely haunting it is to attempt to crawl through the minds of all of these writers in the humble pursuit of what they might have to tell us. Searching for common threads that bind humanity throughout centuries and whatnot. I am almost getting run over by frat boys on skateboards. I am riding my own skateboard just to spite them. I am eating avocado sandwiches under the palm trees and feeling my whole life come to me in the waves of nostalgia that Santa Ana winds blow in.

And then, all at once, I am walking through that world for the last time. The late golden light is pooling around my ankles in thick streams of honey that make it hard to move. I stand there for a long time, on the edge of that campus, watching the sun dip, before taking one last look and leaving it all together. I walk down the steps, I get into my car, and I miss the whole thing before it has even gone.

I am sipping champagne as my family toasts to my graduation, sneaking away to do extra editorial work for my internship so my editor doesn’t slaughter me come Monday. I am reviewing exhibitions across New York’s galleries and interviewing artists and falling in love with the art of images. I am sitting in moody, hip bars with my friend, drinking to our last rendezvous before I leave.

It’s Christmas. New Years. Early February, and I am gone.

February and I am standing on the curb of the San Diego airport in my brown wool coat, hugging my parents, and the only world I had ever known, goodbye. I am walking away as my mother is nearly collapsing, catching the attention of a nearby security guard who she turns to and hysterically explains—My daughter is moving to New York.

I am moving to New York. I am staring out of the cold windows of the cab as it careens me through my new world. The skeletal, winter trees look exquisite in all of the ways that I imagined they would appear drab. Fire escapes glisten in the setting sun and my cab driver is saying something, one of the real chatty ones, but all I can hear is Brooklyn. The gentle tap, tap, of bony branches against aging windowpanes. The ghostly howl of the wind. The crunch of ice underfoot. Things I never knew.

I am making coffee and listening to jazz, watching snow fall for the first time. I am wiping endless streams of watery snot from my nose and trudging through the dead of winter until I start tripping over tulips. Daffodils. Pansies. They shoot up under my feet. I hear birds. Rain. The city changes entirely. Spring blooms so slowly and then all at once, already giving way to summer. Fireflies perform their dance as someone’s barbecue wafts through the air. String lights flicker on in my neighbor’s gardens as the soft, indistinguishable chatter of an intimate gathering begins. I sit on my stoop, swatting at gnats, watching couples chase each other on bicycles in the sunken, stale heat of another summer day. I have never seen a world like this one before.

It is July again now and I am walking through Brooklyn at 8pm. Sunflower stalks sway in the thick, warm air and I reach out to touch one just to know that it is real. That I am 21.

That I was ever 21.

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