On Twenty One
I had a clear plan: turn twenty one in the same way John Lennon did, in some sort of self-inflicted spiritual exile in the city of my dreams. Where Rick and Ilsa are still in love, where James Joyce found artistic solace, where Midge’s mom escaped to from 1950s New York; for in Paris, I would finally be sequestered just enough to tolerate twenty one, and if not, I would be comforted by the presence of the Eiffel Tower, and the romance of hurling myself off of it.
Instead, I now find myself twenty one years old and infected with coronavirus in an Airbnb three blocks away from my elementary school. The typical nighttime dread took on a different form last night when it dawned on me that my birthday was no longer something I could escape overseas; I was to be confined to these four walls on the exact day that I spent a thousand dollars trying to avoid.
Less than two weeks after New Years, my birthday is scheduled like a personal attack. On New Years, we are all encouraged to become better together. I make lists in my notes app: write more. be more frugal. seriously clean out your closet. Things I am capable of, and realistically will do. New Years? Conquered. But then, like a silent killer, twelve days pass and I am confronted by the real monster, the day of reflection, the day that truly marks a new beginning: my birthday. A birthday is pointed and with an agenda, it has a personal vendetta, and especially a twenty first birthday wants you to get fucked up. I do not want to get fucked up, I do not want to have a whole new age to navigate, and I especially do not want to have to have more birthdays. So many unanswerable questions feel like they are on deadline today.
As I sit in this rented room overlooking a snowy Lyndale Farmstead on the corner of 40th and Colfax, there is this terrible juxtaposition that rises like a lump in my throat. In a disgusting fit of self-imposed nostalgia I picture myself at 6 years old running down this exact street. I am three blocks away from my childhood home. I am two blocks away from Barton Elementary. I am one block away from the Rose Gardens. Less than a mile from the Bandshell. Less than a mile and a half from Washburn High School. By virtue of my situation my birthday envelops me like a straight jacket. I am surrounded by the places that raised me, but in turning twenty one I am reminded I have a one way flight back to New York City scheduled in eight days. These places that feel comfortably familiar are now completely intangible, just like childhood to the newly twenty one year old.
Usually I write out of desperation, trying to make my thoughts penetrable by extracting some sort of coherence byway of sentences. But on this birthday I feel equally desperate after writing, like nothing is coherent about birthdays and nothing is coherent about being twenty one.
