21:
“I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
…
Looking back, you now realize you spent the first year of it dreaming and the second year living. Your hair was red, then brown, then yellow, then pink. You changed it around to figure yourself out. Then you changed yourself to figure him out.
After a year, the people in your life started to fade like old photographs. He had moved away by then, and took your focus with him. Now you had to go too.
And who could blame you? This is it, you thought to yourself then. This is why.
You packed your car and said goodbyes. This is so much love, you swelled.
…
Years later, a different boy in your bed, you casually mention the days you lived in the desert.
“Why did you move out there?” he wants to know.
For a boy, you say.
23:
My brother was born with a large birthmark over his left eye that occurs in 0.005% of the population. Subsequent surgeries improved its appearance, though, in my brother’s own words, he has “long since given up on looking normal.”
Growing up together, I never really gave much thought to it or how he must have felt about it, in part, due to the beauty of childish obliviousness, but mostly because that wasn’t part of his identity to me. He was my brother and that’s how I thought of him first. The birthmark? I honestly have to remind myself that it’s there.
My mother doesn’t feel the same way.
From the start, it pained her that my brother endured ignorant and hurtful comments. It pained her when it pained him. She blamed herself. She blamed my dad. She blamed everyone and she blamed no one.
My mother was determined to do as much as she could to make up for the black spot my brother was born with.
And she was fantastic. She was loving and supportive and encouraging and constructive. But there wasn’t enough of that in her to go around. She was unhappy in her own marriage, drained by work and home duties, and so the small amount of optimism and positivity she procured, she gave it all to my brother.
And I became the unwitting figure to help her shoulder the rest.
I didn’t understand that as a child, though I do now. It used to confuse and frustrate me that my brother and I grew up in the same household but saw two very different people when we looked at our mom.
Back then, my mom had not yet learned how to have enough love in her own heart to be able to build my brother up without pushing me down in the process. Years and years later, I now think I see that lesson begin to take hold, though it is too late. Decades of old habits and old scars pollute the landscape of our relationship and crushing insults fly out of her mouth on their own accord, the easy path lubricated by twenty-seven years of routine.
She was my original heartbreak.
23:
… or whatever.
I was digging through an old spiral notebook today, searching for unused lined paper, when I found a sheet on which I had tracked personal going-on’s for past birthdays in a manner similar only to archaic library catalogues. Handwritten. Yellowed paper. Saved as reference.
20 was spent lounging, daiquiri in hand, by a pool off the coast of Mexico.
21, drunk in Las Vegas, encouraging strange men to buy me drinks and forcing my sister to be my designated driver.
22, at my parents’ house in Tustin, abnormally thin and suffering from a broken heart.
23, indoors during a rainy Taiwan spring, receiving the largest bouquet of flowers I’ve ever gotten.
24, revelling in the most beautiful part of China, letting everyone think my friend was my husband just because we shared hotel rooms.
25, in someone’s bathroom in Manhattan, sobbing because my grandfather had just gotten diagnosed with terminal cancer.
26, training in San Francisco for the half-marathon race that I completed 2 weeks later.
27? My god, that’s coming up fast.
I wonder if 27 should be the year I find myself in an authentic, loving relationship. Fully recovered from what I was almost led to believe would be an insurmountable heartache at 22, I speak with more reservation, I write with less conviction, and I run when I should stay.
And damn if I’m not ready for something else.
In a few months, maybe I’ll find myself engaging in romantic relationships where longevity is an actual possibility. Or maybe I’ll just keep dating the hell out of this city until it cries uncle and refuses to see me. I mean, I need something with which to occupy my time (lord knows I can’t find a job to save my life).
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