23

I may cry on my birthday. I don’t know why. 

My life is going rather well at the moment. But there’s something missing. There’s something out of reach, and a feeling of unsettlement growing within me. 

A peculiar thing- like seeing a builder toking on a cherry Lost Mary like a cigar. 

Or something that pulls- like when old people use wired headphones on the bus. 

It’s a longing for what I have never had, known, needed or wanted.

It sits in my chest like a paracetamol that’s gone down the wrong way- gasping for an easier passage. 

An easier emotion, a walk without yearning.

And maybe I’m just twenty-three.

And this is how women feel. 

And, like always, I’m a bit too out of the loop of how life and things work to understand the normalcy of dubiousness. 

To miss the child you birthed and raised in REM sleep. Smiling too hard and too often. Trying, oh the trying. I wonder if I’ve Googled away my sense of original thought. I may never have a job. I need to get a cat. And an apartment. But where would my husband sleep? I may want to sleep starfished. And the baby- oh, wait. He was a dream. 

Seven more years to thirty. 

Cringing at past favourite songs, wondering how you once connected with them. 

Forgetting to wear your retainer- gaps in your teeth like memory. 

I’ll blow out the same stubby candles, wax melting onto the icing, and we’ll all pretend not to see.

I’ll wish for cohesion. Comfort. Cognition. 

I need to start making bucket lists for my birthday. 

Achieve and accomplish something each year to settle it all.