Today I woke up 20 years older than I was yesterday.
What I hadn’t achieved in all the years since I had turned 18, had happened to me overnight: I had gotten old. Ever since turning 18, all of my birthdays have been meaningless. The time just never seemed to pass. I never felt a year older. I felt the days as they passed me by, but never the years. I never felt 19 or 20 or 21. I could never say how old I really was without confirming with myself first: “Is that how old I’m supposed to be? Is that the number I’m meant to say?”
Every birthday since has been me wondering why all these other people were cheering me on, getting me to cut a cake when nothing had happened to warrant that. Every birthday journal entry since has featured the same kind of sentence: “I don’t feel older. How can I be turning 20 when I don’t even feel like I am 19?”
“I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it’s not like that. It happens overnight.”
— Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance
I was not older. Somehow, time had passed and I was still trying to catch up with it. To me, it was like celebrating a cargo ship that had arrived empty. It was just a ship that had gone around the sun for a year and had absolutely nothing to show for it. It felt like the equivalent of celebrating a loveless marriage —an age-less birthday.
The years go by too fast. And I once wondered whether it would change anything if I could be 20 for 2 years, for 730 days. I mean do you realise that you only ever get to be one age for a year? (Even so, I feel like I was 17 longer than I was 20. Although I once heard that it’s because the older you get, the more…relative time seems? Because when you were 5, you were living a fifth of your life, which is not much, and now you’re living one twentieth, one thirtieth of it. So it seems like less time in comparison to the whole of time that you have had. I mean, it explains why a year seems like an eternity to a child, but very little to an adult. Does this mean that the older we get, the less whole we feel, the more fractured we are? I don’t know). But if the years were twice longer, and our lifespans remained the same, what would we be like by the time we turned 50?
This next birthday though, I will feel the full weight and strength of all these years on my shoulders. These additional 20 years will show on my face, all these sands of Time dragging down the skin under my eyes, then my voice, my heartbeats.
I understand, now.
How it is that I can have friends who are having children of their own and how others still have curfews to respect. I understand, in a way that is all too real, that it is not ever the number of years that counts.
Age strikes you in seconds, minutes.
Still, still— what a shame that I’ve outrun Time.
Young Adult, Old Soul 