Turning 30.
It both horrifies and astounds me, floors me. Makes me feel like a whisp from a dandelion fluttering through breezes that are warm and soft. Makes me feel like the cold hard slice of a razor-blade through vinyl. Like old LPs that I've slipped from their sleeves and thrown at the wall and that now sit in clunky piles of bustedness on my hardwood.
It's not that I feel old. It's not that I feel the urge to bemoan my lost twenties. It just feels strange, like when your molar starts to hurt and you tongue it over and over and think that maybe the filling fell out but aren't sure if that was the tooth that ever had the filling in the first place and can't remember what it felt like before, before this one specific moment where you suddenly realized that perhaps it is now gone and you didn't even notice it when it was there to know for certain.
Sitting here, listening to Cat Power sing sad songs makes me want to hug these thirty years up and lick them and/or eat them with an oversized spoon. I keep hearing songs driving to and from the places I go that make me feel like I'm in a film with the most beautifully-timed and chosen soundtrack ever, and that remind me to appreciate.
So I can say this:
I feel blessed when I find myself still marveling and awestruck at a blizzard that knocks everything out of commission. I feel charmed that I still enjoy little stupid shit, like the rattling interruption when you suck something really hard and metallic up into a vacuum cleaner, that I still remember someone writing a brief poem or observation about that exact noise and how they loved it back in an old issue of
Sassy magazine that I probably read in 4th or 5th grade and how I felt connected to them right then in that shared appreciation, and how I still remember. I dig that I thought the word "keyhole" right now and then thought how perfectly perfect and lovely a word it is. I appreciate that I can think of something as small as the sensation of squishing fat macaroni-and-cheese noodles around in my mouth, all gross and goopy, and it makes me smile. I feel joyous that I can love a being and she can love me back so much that she will do anything to sleep as close to my heart and my breath as possible. I delight in the fact that on the occasional Sunday I wake up hyper and filled with pure unencumbered happiness and want to bounce up and down on the bed and instead do irritating things to E like hold my finger just centimeters in front of his closed eyelid as long as it takes until he opens it up and it scares him. I like that I like pancakes, fat with chocolate chips. I find myself startled and appreciative of the fact that I can feel so goddamn sad from a song because it speaks to me just like that. I feel blessed that I am so smitten with the people I love and admire that sometimes it takes all my willpower not to pin them down and makeout with them fiercely. I am in love with the fact that I can picture a pair of boots carefully propped in front of a furnace-vent to dry and that it makes me feel warm inside.
I don't feel old.
I don't really feel young either.
I fear death. I fear aging. I think it sucks that I'm ever going to die, that I have to know this, that I have to dread it and occasionally try to wrap my mind around it. That it makes me question whether the existence of death renders everything pointless, or whether it pumps it all full of such amazing potent beauty that I can't even hold it all in and it pours from my eyes and my ears and my mouth in a humming like that of song or electricity. I try not to think about either because it makes my brain feel like it might bottom-out, like it'll swallow itself up in some black-hole and that will be that.
Most of all, turning thirty is making me wanna talk and talk and talk. And write and write and write. Like I'm afraid that if I don't write it, do it, talk it all now, it's gonna up and elope on me, slip out of that 2nd floor window and into the red sports car idling in the driveway, waiting, and that will be the end of it all.
So to all that I say, happy 30th b-day, my happy 30th-bday.
That is all.
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