I have 4 ½ more hours to be in my twenties.

I’m not feeling it. Like Holden Caulfield, I need to feel a goodbye to something, and I’m just not feeling my twenties.

I have no record of turning 20. It was the one year in the last 16 (or so) that I stopped writing. I can barely reconstruct it: I was dating Alexi, I was home for the summer, I was working for my dad’s company and hating it, and I was horrendously bored. All of my friendships from highschool were skidding out over the horizon. All of the people I had met at university were gone for the summer. Except, I suppose, Scherezade. I think that might have been the first summer I started camping out in her basement for a few days at a time, staring at the disco ball, splitting a bag of chips and watching the same movies over and over.

Let’s see. When I was nineteen, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for money, although school was wonderful and I was basking in the idea of 2 more years. When I was nineteen I was pretty resigned to marrying Alexi and having his kids. When I was nineteen I had long brown hair.

I remember even less about turning ten. Except that when I turned ten, my parents installed air-conditioning in the house. During those years my mom used to buy a Sarah Lee cheesecake, and, because I had no friends, I would eat it for breakfast for a week, one piece at a time. I might have had friends come with me to Wild Water Kingdom, or my best friend may have already moved back to Newfoundland. When I turned ten, I didn’t know what it was like to have friends. Sometimes I wonder if I was happier then.

My birthday always takes place in the summer, and summers have mostly been long stretches of waiting for my real life to begin. Even now, when I should know better. I’m waiting for the Boy to get registered with the professional college here in Ontario, so that he can get a decent job and we can move out. I’m waiting for Blake to figure out that he wants to be toilet trained. I’m waiting to see if, when we move back into the city, our friends still want us around. It’s been a long 6 years. I feel like I’ve been in exile for most of the past decade.

Maybe that’s why I can’t feel a goodbye: I’m caught between a sense that most of what’s coming to me is still on the way, and a sense that it passed me by long ago.

We had a very nice pre-birthday dinner tonight with my parents. The food was good, the conversation most genial and although the cake was excessive (grocery store cakes are a yukky way to blow the diet), I felt more cherished than I have in a very long time.

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- Rocketbride's adventure of 8/08/2006 07:45:00 p.m.