Birthday letters

doors, being alone, turning twenty-seven

Hi, thanks for being here. This is a special post because today is my birthday and when is the best time to be sentimental if not on your birthday? I also want to say I’m really grateful for those of you who have been reading along any of these past eight months. This project has been a big gift. 

AND as a celebration of my birthday month, redeem this link for 27% off monthly subscriptions for a YEAR. Big deal. For only $3.65 a month, you’ll get full access to all paid content + support this project. 

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1

There’s a morning when you wake up alone. Then there’s another one. And another one. And then the days are like that: waking up alone and getting up not thinking about it. This is how time moves forward, and you along with it. You remember something your dad said to you: you’re the only one you have to go to sleep with at night. He never said, you’re the only one you have to wake up with in the morning. Waking up is the good part. You stretch out, you remember what it feels like to roll around in your own dreams. 

2

Someone said not too long ago, I already feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives, haven’t we all? 

You can’t stop thinking about this. You do have a thousand lives lined up behind you. And in front of you. You can and can’t believe this. You want to believe it. You’re twenty-seven years old and have lived in four states through your twenties. You have had more haircuts, colors, wardrobe overhauls than there’s space in your phone to store. Recently you find a picture of yourself before a Bernie rally in February 2020. You almost don’t recognize the person in the photo: a girl taking a picture of herself in the mirror. A photo of a girl of a photo of a girl. This failing recognition happens again, not just by you, but your friends. After only one month of living here, you see a friend who’s visiting and he says that you look like a totally different person than when he last saw you. Your aunt tells you when she sees you this week you look happier than you’ve been in years. 

At a bar a few weeks ago, another friend said how in New York, twenty-two year olds act twenty-seven and twenty-seven year olds act twenty-two. You skip “22” every time you listen to Red, which lately is often. You tell someone you feel younger than you ever have. You repeat one of your favorite Mitski lyrics again and again in your head. I was so young when I behaved twenty-five.

3

A friend passes on advice their friend gave them. Take this time to fall in love with as many things as possible. On the sidewalk outside a poetry reading off Avenue B, a poet says, you can’t treat New York like a city, but a relationship. I hate you I hate you I hate you for ten days straight. Then you’re head over heels again. People leave for months then come running back. It’s hard to imagine even leaving, ever. You write in your journal the first month you are here: it’s like New York was always the other woman in my relationships.

4

You go to parties. There are important people there. Dean Kissick grabs his jacket from the chair behind someone quizzing you about your job. You don’t say a word to him. You go to parties. There are people you don’t know. You take drugs someone else paid for with their hard earned salary, you drink expensive mezcal on someone else’s trust fund. You go to parties. You know no one. You get up to the roof and by faith alone, you don’t fall through. There’s a very precarious ladder. You still climb up. Like being born again, and you actually believe it. You go to parties. Dance, and don’t care how dumb you look. You wear the wrong thing, often. You make a friend, a new friend, another friend. You go to parties. 

5

In March, an astrologer tells you that some people just aren’t meant to live past twenty-seven. You spend the next seven months being superstitious. Your new roommate maps out the numerology of your summer. Everything adds up to seven. Two of your least favorite years of life were seven and seventeen. You spend the year thinking about your most important celebrity crush who has the same illness you do and who died at twenty-seven. You type, who also died at twenty-seven, which makes you even more superstitious so you backspace as quickly as possible.

6

Suddenly you can say things you couldn’t say before. You’ve dated around. You’ve stayed up until five am. You’ve gone almost broke with a week before pay day. You’ve broken habits you thought were lifelong patterns. You’ve stopped obsessing over groceries, credit card bills, dentist appointments, having good taste in music, finding a hobby, running. You actually start to love to run. You fuck up and don’t spend seven to ten business days beating yourself up. You believe again in the possibility of your own life. You text your friend, it feels like my life just started.

7

Reminded that these things happen: doors open, people walk through. 

8

Most of the year is unremarkable. It started in a car driving from Tennessee to North Carolina, a drive you’d been in the passenger seat more times than you can count. You were coming down with a cold. You don’t remember what music played or the way the light looked. You were another year and hour older, then another. The year passes like this: returning to Iowa, quitting a job, starting a new one, moving, making new friends, moving again. You could recall the fragments, the snow that kept you inside one of the first weekends in Nashville. The plans canceled and promises broken. First sign of spring in March, then snow again. White knuckled drives on interstates. Hours in Whole Foods. Now the hiss of the radiator in an apartment that’s not really yours. You can’t remember what your favorite song was then. 

9

One week before your birthday, you go to another poetry reading. It has been a year of poetry readings. Despite frequent conversations about your suspicion of poetry, it’s still fun to be around poets. Some things don’t change. This reading takes place in a tiny gallery on Avenue B. There are no chairs and the audience who make it inside sit on the floor, so the poets join the audience on the floor to read. Everyone else crowds on the sidewalk and watches the reading from the window. A poetry aquarium, your friend says. 

The poet who talks to you later on the sidewalk reads a short poem called “October.” The poem is maybe nine lines total, but every line strikes you. You try to memorize it from the paper placed on the floor, but can’t keep the words in your head beyond: you can’t have everything you want.  

10

A friend writes about how she stars every place she goes to on Google maps as a reminder. You start to do this obsessively a few weeks after moving to New York. Retroactively you star the places you went to when you first got here. You star the bodega in Bushwick where you bought the best quesadilla of your life. You star the places you’ve been kissed: a park, a street corner, a restaurant. You star your friends’ apartments so you can find them with ease before you remember intuitively how to get there. 

Sometimes on the train when you don’t have service, you pull your fingers across the phone screen to see all the little stars you’ve left across Manhattan and Brooklyn. One hundred and eighty stars.  

11

You learn to be alone. There are so many places you can go where being alone serves you well. Balthazar will give you free champagne. A single seat on the train. Most of your life you’ve learned to squeeze yourself into small spaces as to not make a scene. Here what you once thought was a flaw in your character—the willingness to make yourself small–is actually a survival skill. A privilege you start to think of as stray dog freedom. Scrappy and quick, not afraid to get soaked in the rain. There’s no limit to the ground you can cover. One day you walk ten miles and talk to hardly anyone.

12

Someone asks at a party, what do you want to do in your life? You’re grateful they use the phrase in your life rather than with your life. This isn’t the answer they’re looking for but it’s what you have: You want to go to more parties. Only the good ones. The kind you can sit at a table for hours with people you like and not feel awkward for not mingling. What you really want is to lounge around all day. At twenty-five, you wrote on a poster board I’m not afraid of hard work during lockdown. Now you are afraid of it, or at least it doesn’t drive you like it used to. You want to have expensive taste without causing yourself the expense. You want to write every hour of every day. In reality, you probably wouldn’t. 

13

The rain comes in sheets the last week of twenty-six. There’s a hurricane, obviously. The whole country knows this. The relevant regions prepare. Increasingly something you haven’t done in the last year is prepare. Right before the rain comes, you find yourself saying to a friend that you didn’t realize there was a hurricane happening. She laughs and says she only knows because it’s her job to know. It occurs to you that you’ve built a rose-colored glass house around yourself these last few months to keep bad news out. A generous therapist might call this emotion-focused coping. But you think how all the books and conversations you’ve had about narcissism apparently have not done you any good. You need to buy a better umbrella.    

14

A friend says you have to feel desirable. He meant it like this: you have to feel that you are desired by yourself so you don’t doubt it when others desire you. You didn’t realize desirable was something you could feel. Before, only thinking desirable was something you could be. Feeling and being in this case the same thing. It’s easier to believe this than it was before. This is the year you like your appearance most of the time. You begin to believe the compliments people give you. Vanity as an improvement to constant self-deprecation. When someone tells you you’re great at something, you say, I am great. To test the waters of newfound belief. The stakes have felt so high in the past. This is how you figure out how to lower them. 

15

When people talk about love, attraction, desire, it’s hard not to wonder–what would it be like to be in love with that person? What is this person like with every person they ever loved? Of course it’s only a self-contained thought experiment, but you hope you’re not the only one who wonders this. How do people change around each other when they’re in love? How are the people you know suddenly different when you’re alone with them? How are you different when you’re in love than you are when you’re alone?

16

Saturday night, the last Saturday of twenty-six, you wait too long for a friend in the rain. It’s a little romantic. Friendship is something you learned can be romantic. For the first time in a long time, you find yourself wanting to prioritize friendships over partnerships. You tell a friend during the summer that you believe you are driven by love. That your purpose in life is to love. And it’s true, you’re in love with your friends.

That night, you look up at an apartment building outside of the restaurant and imagine your friend walking up to find you soaked down to your clothes. Happy to see you. There’s always someone to wait for. You’re hardly ever late because you don’t want to someone to think you don’t want to see them. You have not yet learned the lesson that forgiveness for being late is easily given, which is funny because you forgive people almost instantly for making you wait. Because it’s enough to see your friend smile when he arrives. Thanks for waiting. Later, when you sit close together in your raincoats before the check comes like two kids sitting on the sidewalk waiting for their parents to pick them up, you remember what Annie Ernaux wrote. You only know presence and absence. But you still feel that presence is all you want to know.

17

Coincidences pile up, you’re only one degree apart from everyone at all times. New friends come into your life and every time it feels like dumb luck. When walking after work one day, you tell your friend that you want to prioritize friendships this year. He tells you that it’s amazing you’re able to stick to goals, to have that clarity. So you try to stick to that clarity. Some new friends you write letters to, some you see more than others because you work hard to see them. The newness still surprises you. One of your closest friends now you’ve only known since January. Someone once said that in New York, it can be weeks between seeing even your closest friends. Sometimes this is true, but you’ve also found the more you reach towards people, the more they reach back.

18

A door did open. You chose to walk through it. You understand it wasn’t the door you thought you’d walk through. Now you’re running through. You can spend a lot of time looking for such doors without even knowing it. The door you thought was a trap door was the only door all along.

19

What kind of cake should I get, you ask several friends in the week before your birthday. There’s a bakeshop on the block that you’re pretty sure is the one a friend from Nashville told you she worked at when she lived in Brooklyn. Another coincidence you take to be a good sign. When a different friend visited, you told her you were going to buy yourself a cake from this bakeshop for your birthday. One night she came back from dinner with a slice of birthday cake from the bakery. A test run, she says. The cake is perfect. You try not to finish it in one night, but the two of you do. When the cake is gone, you run your finger along the plate until the icing disappears, too. The late summer night sky refuses to go dark, but instead lingers as your favorite shade of purple. 

20

Also on the block is a pair of doors with cartoon women on them. One door reads: when one door closes. The other: another door opens. This you don’t take to be a sign.

 photo courtesy of @artnnyrk

21

There’s one morning after a party that turns into the late afternoon. Then again there have been many mornings like this. Your serotonin is dangerously low. It’s humid because it’s July and for some reason, the humidity is still surprising to you here. At 5 pm, you finally leave the house for a depression walk. There are two children selling lemonade for fifty cents a glass. You buy one with a dollar bill, then walk away with a glass of lemonade garnished with fresh mint from the children’s garden. The little girl calls out that she had change for you. You tell her it’s a tip. She says, that’s very kind of you but you don’t have to do that. The rest of the walk, long after you finish the lemonade, you repeat to yourself what she said. That’s very kind of you, but you don’t have to do that. The world is still so ridiculously beautiful, with angels on every street corner. 

You tell this story exactly the way you write it to a new friend. He says you have a novel in you. You laugh. What you don’t have in you is dinner. 

22

What if I told you all the things you didn’t realize you learned? I can over explain things, if that would help because it’s how you write anyways. You need things explained to you. That you weren’t going to figure out love? That it didn’t rain for a month? That you can walk anywhere and stumble onto something you kind of planned to go to anyways? That the things you romanticize before have the potential to be harsh and ugly? That this shouldn’t surprise you? That you can fall asleep with your head against the train window? That you don’t even really have to know where you’re going at any moment at any point of the day? That you actually believed a friend when he told you what you’re writing is bigger than the things you were determined to write about? 

23

One of the last things a mentor told you in grad school was that you hadn’t found your poem yet. Sad. Two years in the freezing Midwest and all you got was a lame diploma. What you really took this to mean was you weren’t meant to be a writer.

It took six months before you realized he was right. You didn’t want to find your poem. This made you not a poet and you were ok with that. You realize how it’s literally the most normal thing to let go of old dreams. But all that time not writing didn’t mean you weren’t a writer. It meant you needed to write something different. And you probably will have to again. 

24 

A few weeks before you move to New York, you’re crying in the living room of your parents’ house. Your father and sister sit with you until they calmly tell you things you already know are true. They tell you that you should do this, you should move to the place you wanted to be all along. Six months earlier, when you were interviewing for your job and asked why you wanted to leave academia, you quoted Rilke by saying you couldn’t stop hearing the line you must change your life. Six months later, you were changing your life. You wondered, when am I not going to have to change my life. That night you go upstairs to your childhood room and reread the Rilke poem. You’d forgotten the sentence before the final and more famous one. For there is no place that does not see you. 

25

If you can’t tip well, you can’t afford to eat out.

Don’t let the grass grow under your feet. 

Get behind the wheel, stay in front of the storm. 

Don’t fall asleep on the subway. 

This is a tough city, you can’t forget that. 

Sing the entire way home if you’re walking home alone and it’s late. 

Never tour an apartment that’s out of your price range because no apartment will ever make you happy again.

You’ll get the hang of it. 

Don’t ride in a subway car if no one else is in it. 

The stakes have never been lower.

Go inside, don’t worry about it. 

You moved here only a few months ago? You have so much time.

26

The last day of twenty-six you take the train by yourself to the Cloisters. You cry at the unicorn tapestries and the Spanish cathedral. A tour guide says, you can see they’re together in this work of art. You miss don’t catch what she’s referring to, but write it down anyways. You’ve spent the day talking to very few people, so the sound of a human voice in the space is strange. There should only be the sound of a choir. Outside on the terrace, you offer to take a photo of a family. The mother asks if you would like a picture. No thank you, but then the rest of the afternoon you regret it.

When you do see people later that night, you’re surrounded. The solitude of the day made sweeter by suddenly being with the people you like most. You sit on the floor at a karaoke bar after singing too many songs. One martini makes you crazy enough to walk through Ridgewood in your socks. Before midnight, your friend asks if you want a picture. This time you say yes. The last image of you at twenty-six is blurry.

27

All of your life you felt propelled here. You tell everyone how you knew this is where you were supposed to be, from your first visits as a child, as soon as you could understand what a city was. Now you are here. Like the creatures in The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, whose only sense is touch and who only have the ability to say two sentences:

Here I am, here I am, here I am.

So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.