On my twenty-fourth birthday, I went to Edinburgh and sat around a dining table full of women I had just met and one I had loved for a long time. One of them had cooked a mushroom risotto for all of us to enjoy and someone else had bought a couple of bottles of wine to pair with it. Candlesticks stuck in recycled bottles of wine burned brightly and I remember thinking that if this new age would be defined by anything, it would be this night.
Managing to survive twenty-three, twenty-two, and twenty-one felt like an accomplishment. My early twenties chewed me up and spit me out, no longer able to stand the taste of my rotten and naive flesh. Unfortunately, naivety persisted and had me believe that reaching my twenty-fourth year could leave me on the outside of the trials and tribulations of young adulthood. In the ways that one cringes upon individual self-reflection, I cringe at having believed I knew a single thing at all. I hadn’t a clue.
I returned to Paris and a new job feeling hopeful at the promise of a fresh start. Something about birthdays makes me feel new, the turn of a new age and leaf making anything possible. In March of 2023, I had no idea what I wanted. I dated aimlessly, walked along the Seine on my own, and wrote so much that my fingers cramped. I thought, often, about what I would do next, fearing that whatever choice I made, part of my heart would always be somewhere else. If I left Paris, I would miss it the same way that I was missing Chicago then. Oh, how homesick I was both for Chicago and in anticipation of my inevitable, unplanned departure from Paris.
Sometime between figuring out my plans and embracing the directionless journey, I fell in love. Great love. And it tethered me to Paris in its complex, emotional beauty. Time races by me as I grow up. Love made it fly. I could kneel on the banks of the river of time and try and scoop up as much as my hands could carry but there would never be enough of it. Eventually, I would have to decide to go home just as I was always going to. Now, my heart was factoring in someone who never asked that of me.
Summer came and summer went. I lost my job, leaving me eight short hours to pack up my European life and move fifteen minutes away into a willing and patient girl’s apartment. In July I was throwing tantrums on her bedroom floor, reading books, and picking up odd jobs to get by. I was ruled by neuroticism and anxiety about what came next for me, I could hardly ever be where I was.
Then I left. Even though the August air in Chicago was thick and heavy when I arrived, I took the deepest breath I had in months. Anything was possible where I was fluent and native. As I got into my friend’s car, I thought that maybe I had come back because it was easier. Then I accepted that sometimes it is okay to make the easy choice. Who was I trying to prove myself to?
I was teaching again, I was cultivating a new community, and I was thriving. The easy choice was validated in this. Home was wherever I needed it to be and in that moment, it was in Chicago. And it still is. Home, in its complex nature, was also 5,000 miles away, in the bed of the woman I loved.
Heartbreak, though a common occurrence–especially in one’s twenties–is more cutting than one can ever imagine. She comes in full force and takes me out, causing erratic behavior and tear-stained sheets. Leaving me with the knowledge that grief can manifest from many sources. I learned to allow myself to feel it and to be loved by my friends despite my avoidant tendencies. I bowed towards the great Joni Mitchell and “Blue” for giving me the space to grieve.
Twenty-four comes to an end, as all years must but this time I am more sure of myself than ever before. Now, I know that I am going to learn over and over and over again before I ever really know anything at all. On dance floors, I come to life. I date again and I am kinder this time around both to them and to myself. In bars, restaurants, and my apartment and those of others I am present for the conversations. What will come will come. I only have moments left of being this young.
I turn twenty-five in a room full of the people I love most in the world. They sing me happy birthday, tell me they’re proud of me, and kiss my cheeks. I know I am loved but I am feeling it full-force in this moment. I use my candle wish on wishing to learn to be present all of the time, constantly. I wrote in my January 2023 Instagram post, “I cannot go on without accepting I cannot go back.” In the same beat, I cannot go on without being right here, living in it as it is.
Candlesticks burn to the nub, bottles fill up my recycling, and my friends squeeze me goodbye. I am there, in my life, for my life. As I lay my head down, I reflect on the turbulence of the year behind me and count how many ways it shaped me. It is strange to keep getting older when I never thought I would. I am privileged to be living for it is a strange, glorious, heartbreaking, and humbling thing.