34 and back at it.

This one’s for the good new days ahead. I was never a big fan of Michael Bublé's Feeling good song but I had it played at my birthday. “It’s a new life and I’m feeling good” is the part I’m not particularly fond of. It’s my same life. It’s the same life that makes me “both happy and sad and still trying to figure out how that could be” (Stephen Chbosky). This is still the quote that sums me best. This is the same life that surprised me with regret when I least expected it and the same life that made me a person I didn’t write in my journal when I was 13. It’s the same life that sometimes feels too much and others feels too small and the same life I’m still building alongside the fantasies in my head (who most often than not disagree with it). It’s my same first and singular life, to which I am at times a stranger, a visitor or a homemaker, slowly refining, diligently carving, hopefully waiting for those good new days, so that maybe this time around I get to savor them as they happen, before they become the good old days. Birds flying high, wouldn’t it be nice if you knew how I feel? 34 doesn’t really have any ring to it and I never quite liked even numbers. I was always the odd number girl. 15.7. Odd numbers, odd mind, odd life. I wore red nails to my MRI appointment on my birthday. Odd. I think having an MRI on my birthday is fitting to who I am and I actually enjoyed it. Also odd. I’m starting to think I’m like those rooms in which you start adding little trinkets and treasures and souvenirs and memories and books and posters and in the end it looks a mess and it seems nothing fits even though you know every little piece and where you collected it from, but they only make sense to you. I created my own niche and it only makes sense to me. I can show you around though. And maybe I’ll even keep a piece of you in this room, like all the other little pieces I collected. When I started building the room I didn’t know it would work as an airbnb of the soul. But guests came, stayed a while, left a little souvenir, a recipe in the kitchen, a song in the playlist, a movie that changed them, and went about their way. Now when you visit, you step into their traces. You step into a collection of things they left behind, some you like, some you don’t. Some I wish I never got, but I still don’t throw them away, because they were once part of me and I keep them stored away in the peculiar gallery of my life. Some days I revisit them, hopeful I now might have a little more wisdom about them, some days I let out a good cry while visiting and then go about my day. 34 has no ring to it. So there’s no pressure on it either. It’s not the kind of age I expect anything from. So I’m taking it as a break. I’m taking it as time to both undo and become, to remember and figure out. 34 might be an even number, but my life is still as odd as it ever was.