I’m still too young to write about love or youth. I’m 26 tomorrow and I’m hoping to say that I’ve learned something, anything. It feels like I have. I’ve traveled, I’ve worked, I’ve been drunk, I’ve been obsessed with a girl, many times, I’ve felt overwhelming failure. And, I’ve felt the irreversibility of time.
I’ll be 26 tomorrow and that means I’ll never be 25 again. Already I’ll never be 24 again. And it’s been a while since I’d ever get to be 23. When you’re younger it doesn’t matter much to face these “never agains” but eventually they start to add up and there comes to be a lot of ages you’ll never be again. Which amounts to many moments, meals, laughs, nights, decisions, friends and lovers you’ll never get back. They are still there, frozen in time, retrieved in the shape of a memory, but they add to the pile of never-agains that slowly builds throughout your life and which comes to define you and will eventually come to be all that’s left of you. So in a sense it’s good to have lived those moments, because it means I get to be something rather than nothing. But still it feels a little bittersweet because turning 26 tomorrow means I’ve chained myself to a certain way of having-been 25. I was free at the time, but now all the choices I made are things I can never choose again. I’ve consumed those freedoms and chained myself to them. I’ll never get to be 25 a different way.
I get to wondering how other people choose to be 25, what others had accomplished by then. Hemingway had written his first novel by then. Others had found love, spent years in Europe or Asia, become Olympians or movie stars. There are many people who found their greatest success well after 25, and I know I’ll still be young at 26. But I think about, for example, all the books I read at 25 and the path I took between them, and I wonder what would’ve been if I read different books with that time. And I’ll never know the answer to that question.
Knowing that I’m slowly getting older, it hurts a little bit that the pile of things I’ll never-be-again is growing. But the weight of it makes me take my time more seriously. There are things I can really be. No longer being 25 means that I *was* 25. There are things I can really be. And all those nights I have in the form of memories are as real as the nights that might be in my future. And those books I could’ve written, the successes I could’ve had by now, are as real as the ones I could possibly have.
This makes me feel much more serious about life at 26. And not serious in a bad or boring way, in a very exciting way. I have built a past for myself. I can build a future. All this is very real. I am getting older and things, my possibilities, are becoming REAL.
But, as much as there is something redeemable about this sadness, it is still a sadness. I am not guaranteed 27, not even 26. And some days I wonder what year I will die, and I hope that it is not for a while. It could be soon. And if that is the case, let it be heard that I was very happy to be 25, that my life has been good. I feel extremely proud to be able to say that. I don’t think there is a single thing more worthy of pride. I think of all the moments I’ve had and am so ecstatically overwhelmed and the feeling drowns me. It is such a great joy to live and I am grateful to be able to feel so strongly about a thing. To more life!!!
^ above, i have inserted some pictures from my last week being 25