Turning Twenty-Three

I turn twenty-three today, in my childhood home.

It’s where I’ve spent almost all of my birthdays — with the exception of the few I had while in college, just a state over.

I am aging just like the family home.

There are parts of myself that are dead and damaging, parts of myself that I know should cleanse away but never will. Just like how some parts of the ceiling are rotting away, and there are dusty corners that will probably never, ever be cleaned.

They are part of the house now. Like how my flaws and insecurities are a part of me, embedded somewhere deep.

Paint peels off the piss-yellow walls of my room and reveals what was already there. Sometimes I wish I could do the same and peel back the layers of myself so I could start anew.

I could be twenty-three in a different way, the right way. In a way like everyone else seems to be.

When I look in the mirror I don’t see someone who is twenty-three. Or someone who ever was twenty-two. Or twenty-one. Or thirteen. Or three. I don’t see someone who will ever be twenty-four, twenty-five, or thirty-three, or forty-three either.

I just see someone who looks out of place, a little lost. I’m missing something, but I don’t know what.

The other day my mom came into my room and said, “My baby is twenty-three… So sad.”

“Why is that sad?” I had asked.

“I don’t know.” She sighed. I think understood what she meant.

You know those developmental milestones for babies? I think I missed a few of those, as an adult.

I am the 276-month-old who can’t drive, who’s never been in a relationship, who doesn’t own a credit card, who still lives with her parents.

I am aging just like this house. Things are cluttered all over. Boxes and boxes and stacks and stacks of paper. Messy records of who I was. Who I am.

I must sort through it all to figure out some semblance of my identity. Somewhere in there, there is myself. My new self, who I will become one day.

Despite the overwhelmingness of it all, our house is one thing at the very least: lived in.

I have lived in this body for twenty-three years now. I don’t think I will ever figure it out. But at the very least, I know I am lived in. Alive.

The trinkets. The photos. The mountains of stuffed animals.

All records of a natural life. Somebody has been here for twenty-three years. People have been here even longer than that.

There will be more things that break and fall apart in this house. And there will be more birthdays.

Whether or not I will be spending them here, I will be grateful for them.

Happy birthday to me.