Twenty-three

My desires eclipse the years that I have to do them.

May; spring turning slowly to its lateness. In the mornings, variegated birdsong.

I leave my window open all day. My cat perches on the sill, watching the world out of his reach. His ears twitch with want. He has learned not to try, ever since slamming his little body against the screen in response to a particularly tempting sparrow. But he spends hours at his vigil, the tip of his tail flicking, a vestigial memory of his hunting days.

We have become each other’s world. He follows me from room to room; he tucks his body into the crook of my arm or knee, or nestles against my neck. I know when he has found his position by his deep inhale and sigh. He snores when he sleeps, which is almost always. When I wake him, he yawns. His teeth click against each other like a latch.

I know his moods and movements. I know where to scratch under his chin or at the soft top of his head to make his eyes close. I know when he is upset at me, when he is tired, when he is bored. I know when he wants to go out or eat or sleep. Intimacy is simple; it correlates exactly with time.

I love lilies, but I never buy them. Tulips, also. This is for him.

It is the season to love and fall in love. This can be person, animal, object, habit. It is the easiest month to develop sentimentality; the warm weather opens you to everything.

I write again. I take walks, long, time-wasting ones, and watch the birds and trees and sky. I run almost every day. I have learned to pace from my run club, and distances that were impossible a year ago become my easy runs. I read at every lunch break. I have stopped caring if this makes me strange or antisocial; it makes me happy; it keeps the other muscle of my brain from atrophying.

I made the ask to move as I do many things—without real conviction. Deferring the decision to someone else. If no, then no; it was not meant for me. If yes, then, well.

When the answer is yes, my life whirlwinds away. What I had imagined idly now becomes imminent. I hunt Zillow for apartments after work. I take stock of my apartment, imagine what I will have to discard, what I must keep. I tally what I have not yet done and the time I have left, and find them disproportional. My evenings become an exercise in circumventing regret.

Options open to me that had not ever been in my imagination. I Google for part-time Master’s programs late one night, just for something to do. I apply to one that evokes an old dream. I get in a week later, even before I have dusted it off.

After rain, I go for a walk. The late slant of light burns through the landscape. Every blade of grass wears a wet pearl. I watch the lotus flowers budding on the river, the beaver slicing through the water’s dark silk. A rabbit pauses in the field; the sun against it creates a perfect golden outline, which it carries forward as it runs.

Revelations. I have made for myself a life, belonging to no one else. A direction I set alone. I make and use and misuse my own time. I reap my consequences and my joys.

It is a wonderful and terrifying thing. I develop my own desires, my own unreasonable asks of the world. I think little anymore of what I am meant to do, or should.

I am less afraid, also, of burning through the currency of youth. I used to believe everything of worth should be done before thirty, when I was young enough still to be beautiful and precocious, to some degree, and therefore more worthy of admiration. But my desires eclipse the years that I have to do them.

At nineteen, I was afraid of twenty-one; at twenty-one, I was afraid of twenty-three. I have been all of them now, and I have never felt so old that what I desire is no longer possible.

Youth is silly, also. As I write, I am increasingly aware of my failings, my lack of experience, my inexactness of language, my ungainly phrasing. I was worse in years prior; I will be better in the years to come. Elegance and precision are earned. There are things I write now that I could not have written earlier, and things I have tried to write now that will not come to me until later.

I take each year as it comes. I do what I desire; what is available to me; what I can. I learn what I want out of the world, and how to ask it, and pursue it, and ask, if necessary, again. When I die, it will not matter what age I’ve done the thing. Only that I’ve done it.