If you look very closely, you can see it. The tiny string tying your whole life together—every decision, every thought.

I woke up to a ladybug crawling along my windowsill. Good luck. Birds are singing, breaking the long silence of snow. The sun warming. I can feel my soul defrosting after the coldest winter New York has seen in decades.

TULIPS AROUND THE BEND

Soon, there will be daffodils springing up under our feet.

Tulips will bend and blossom on every corner, lining the path back to Sunday farmers markets on the Upper West Side. Fresh tomatoes in one hand, sour bread in the other. We will dip the ends in olive oil from the new apartment we will share come June. We’ll laugh at the impossibility of the heat, sitting under the Brooklyn Bridge until the sun goes down at 10 p.m.

There, we will turn deeper into the digits of our twenties, watching the city change as we change alongside it. I get dizzy all the time looking down at the distance between now and just a few years ago. It’s almost too much to take.

Life used to be a thing we had yet to formally meet. Everything was just over the horizon and we were chasing the sun, so sure that our lives would start at any moment if we could just reach it. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t wish to catch the sun. There’s no longer a part of me that wishes to speed anything up. I know now that this is it.

I know that time melts at a fast enough rate. Like a popsicle in July, it will drip down my wrists in thick syrupy streams and pool at my feet. The hot summer sidewalks will wear its hue like ruby-red lipstick, Red Dye No. 5. Or more likely, knowing my mother, real cherry juice. I am seven and the world will never be this small again.

A STRING OF DECISIONS

I feel so embedded in life now. Active, alive, real. I’m always dreaming, but I don’t feel like I am waiting to wake up anymore. It’s such a strange thing to be very young, and then to slowly feel yourself growing out of it. Slowly, quietly, you feel your frontal lobe tying its final knots, whispering to you, daring you, to make one more reckless decision before it’s too late.

Get another piercing stabbed through your ear by a guy with Mary Jane still on his breath in San Diego.

Move to New York City without a job or a single 212 contact in your phone.

Listen to die-hard indie bands on the Lower East Side and give a girl your hair tie in the bathroom.

Go on the date with the guy who makes you laugh, even if you swore the whole thing off.

Cater a wedding for two nights in Tribeca until you don’t know what day it is and then never go back.

Know nothing important about money and feel like a newborn baby doing your taxes. Who’s letting me do this?

Spend a balmy summer teaching kids how to read with nothing but an extensive knowledge of Sylvia Plath to qualify you and maybe they really should have looked into that.

Have a perfectly weird roommate you met online who does perfectly weird things you will never understand but will laugh about for the rest of your life, because they will be the last roommate you will ever have and no one told you. No one told you that that era ends.

One day, you will say sure to drinks and you will cross a street and look up and there’s your new roommate. There’s your new life.

Spend an entire Tuesday walking laps around the reservoir in Central Park. Ride the train for hours just to ride the train for hours. Spend time like you will never not have it.

Say yes to odd jobs.

Spend a weekend in the desert. Swear that it changed you even though you know how cliché that sounds.

Start a blog. Tell everyone everything on it and then cringe forever over how unabashedly vulnerable you were before your life became something not entirely just your own anymore.

Sit in the sun on Valentine’s Day. Stare out at the Statue of Liberty and feel the tickle in your stomach that it still gives you.

Look very closely.

Tilt your head and squint and you might just see her, 9 years old, getting lifted off the ground by her father beneath Lady Liberty, not yet knowing she would be back. Come hell or high water, with reckless abandon. And thank God.

Because if you zoom back out, you’re sitting on the water in DUMBO.

Are we the enemy? He asks, grinning as people jog by.

I think back on all the decisions I have made. Impulsive or thought out, reckless or calculated, random or fated. Each collision of thought that pointed here with a big, blinking sign. I think too of all the Valentine’s Days I spent single, and how much I always adored seeing people in love.

No.

I lift my head from his shoulder, grateful for how it all led here.