twenty-three
Being twenty-three is a lot of things besides any palpability of the matter. There’s a long list of reasons why I feel my age, but I don’t always believe them. Mostly because I still feel seventeen in many ways except when I was that young, I acted much more helpless and I was much meaner to my mom. When I was seventeen I was constantly in a place of familiarity because I was in high school, turning in assignments on the same day as my friends and putting on concealer in the bathroom before class and counting down the days until a Saturday in May when we graduate. I am learning to accept that it will never be that way again because now I am twenty-three and I have a friend who is buying a house and my debit card got declined buying a bagel. Nobody asked me if I was ready when I turned twenty-three, but I got over it.
At some point between then and now, I had the unfathomable experience of discovering the word nostalgia and I realized that it would always feel like this. That home was no longer the house on Yampa Street with the big tree in the front yard and my mom and sister living no more than a room away, and the bedroom with the teal walls, and the cats in the window. The fallacy in communication is that telling someone I want to go home, even someone who has been in that house and slept in my bed, could easily see a misunderstanding of my request. Desire isn’t always so definable. I say I want to go home but what I mean is I want to go back to sleeping with the windows open and to working late shifts at my first job and walking home in the dark, to the vacation I took with my dad in 2016 and to my mom putting a warm washcloth on my forehead when I don’t feel good. Mostly, I want to go home to being seventeen and naïve. We don’t live in the house on Yampa Street anymore, but the tree is still in the front yard and there is still a hidden layer of awful teal paint in the upstairs bedroom, so I suppose that’s good enough.
Sometimes things just end, and I can’t romanticize it and I can read a lot of books and look for answers, but it won’t explain the fact that sometimes things really do just end. It isn’t sad, I want to think, but an ending implies the death of something, whether good or bad and to me that’s sad. This feeling is a backseat driver on my way to the grocery store – it rests on the back of my neck and sometimes makes it impossible to sit straight. It’s very strange, I’ve realized, to relinquish yourself to the loneliness of being twenty-three. Lonely may not be the right word because it denotes a sort of sadness that I do not necessarily feel and it has shown up on much worse occasions, but I don’t exist in a realm of familiarity anymore and sometimes that’s alienating. By default, I feel like I’m too far from where I want to be and what I want to do. I feel far from the version of myself that I want to be perceived as and far from the bed I want to sleep in and the windows I want to look out of. But I know that I am very young, and I have time, which is not a terrible thing to have, so I will give a home to whatever this feeling is and I will decorate it with fresh flowers.
When I was seventeen and unaware, I operated under the assumption that if I could not constantly see goodness and love surrounding me, then it wasn’t there. But I’m realizing that maybe I was wrong about everything. Each moment of this realization is my favorite thing. I am seeing that people can still fall in love and even if you meet the wrong people, there’s enough time to figure it out. This is also when I realized that not everyone acts like the people I once wanted to love me. When I do find moments of hidden joy, I think I can survive here. I love August, I love black loafers and white socks, I love oddly specific Spotify playlists, I love eating pho when it’s snowing, I love the way my hair looks in a claw clip. To have this hope that love will show up for me in the accumulation of small and ordinary things makes me feel twenty-three. I know that I’ll get hurt and have my moments of misery, I’ll cry on the phone to my mom when my flights are delayed, I will lose things, find them again, I’ll be sick and alone in my apartment, and I will make it home for Christmas. The love will be there regardless.
And I do feel my age in these moments. Sometimes I think everything in the world exists solely to define me. When the books and the technology and the music and the bars all speak directly to me and push me closer to the center of the circle. I feel aggressively twenty-three when I book my own plane tickets, despite the anxiety that comes along with it, forcing me to arrive at the airport three hours early and only select the middle seat of the plane. I feel twenty-three when I pay rent and when I’m cooking in my apartment. In fact, this is the apartment where I live alone for the first time. The apartment in the orange building with the mango tree outside that forced upon me the ability to parallel park. The few books on my shelves are creased at the spine, except for the new ones that I ordered despite being in the middle of another one, and the salt lamp on top of my fridge. There are other times I feel abruptly out of the circle. The feeling is heavy and I don’t always know where to put it when it comes around, but it’s there, in my unwashed dishes and unmade bed, waiting for me to pick it up again. This age is challenging and annoying on all accounts, but it’s bittersweet. When I leave here, I probably won’t be able to admit it.