Life in Moments: Vol. 2 - Birthday Girl

It’s my birthday this week. This past weekend I decided to compile more unedited snippets from my past journals and letters, the second installment of Life in Moments. I find the process fascinating, leafing through the old lined sheets is like deja vu, like I’m meeting someone I only vaguely remember.

I wrote the one in the slide with the street lamps on my birthday two years ago, quietly observing how birthdays seem to get more and more mundane as the years pass. That year I visited the beach with my family, endured the wind, and bought some cake, due to my mom’s insistence that we have nice photos to look back on. Last year I went to a meeting and ate a slice of funfetti cake on my friend’s bedroom floor. Birthdays seem so frivolous as time goes on and I can’t help but feel ambivalent towards my own. Birthdays every year feels a bit excessive, wouldn’t every 5 years be more appropriate? Like Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Cat's Cradle, maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists.

Most of the lines and thoughts in my journals will never see the light of day, but I wrote them and know they exist and that's all that matters. I chose the ones that made the most sense out of context, much of the rest is quite jig-saw piece like and only make sense in the greater picture. These moments of quiet struggle have taken on a new meaning now that I am able to look back at them with an updated perspective, but I suppose that's why I wrote them with a hopeful heart in the first place. Maybe one day I will look back at my current blog posts and writing with a similar tilt of my head. I'll relive the emotions I wrestled and fought through the nights alone at my desk in an effort to depict them in words. I'll understand myself better from my rebellious efforts to create something tangible and consequential, out of what I once tried and failed to convince myself was utterly inconsequential, especially in the grand scheme of the world. Now it's real and made so through the art created from the dust and shadows of the days past, these thoughts that seem to only be characterized by their fleeting nature are now permanent.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that because it’s in words, my youth will last.

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