35 things

birthday list

1. Next Wednesday, I turn 35.

2. 35 feels big and scary.

3. In 2016, on my 25th birthday, I went through my abusive ex’s now-wife’s Instagram and accidentally liked a post. I thought I was going to die. She blocked me immediately.

4. I am the first single woman homeowner in my lineage.

5. Sometimes I want to fall in love and move someone into my home. I imagine me and someone who comes in the shape of a blur, laying on the rug, staring at the french washed turquoise ceiling, laughing.

6. Other times, I can’t imagine emptying one of my four closets for anyone.

7. I think I have never looked more beautiful than I look right now.

8. Ryan once told me I was always beautiful.

9. I met Amos Kennedy Jr. last week, who told us he never even saw a letterpress printer until he was 38. He used to be an accountant.

10. I think there are people who think they are helping, but they are really just cops.

11. I keep using the word beautiful. I think it is because there is this myth fed to us that beauty fades with age, but I have actually experienced the opposite.

12. My friend Chloe is starting this thing called Sparkle Lake. Today she told me there will be lambs there.

13. I once thought being soft was stupid. I still sometimes do.

14. Crying feels embarrassing.

15. I cried in a café today, and while I was crying, a white man quietly tried to take the other chair at my table without asking.

16. It is a disservice to the people around me to keep saying I am alone.

17. I love being alone, though. I love keeping secrets for myself.

18. I think people take judgements as facts.

19. Most of my judgements are so flippant. I flip and I flop.

20. I keep saying, “It’s not that deep.”

21. I participated in this Alice Coltrane deep listening group thing. I wonder what it would’ve been like to invite Alice Coltrane to my Ammama’s house in Hyderabad. I think my Ammama would be impressed with Alice eating lentils with her hands while I use a spoon.

22. If I am bringing up how my race is impacting the way you are speaking to me as a white person, then you probably should not respond by saying I shouldn’t bring up race or skin color.

23. When people ask me how I am doing, I tell a funny story.

24. When I am around the people I choose, the places I love, in my favorite pairs of shoes, wearing big sunglasses I stole from Target, I am in control.

25. A lot of adulthood has been obligations over choice.

26. I hope, in my late 30s, to stop putting myself in the line of fire to avoid the awkward moment of needing to say no or step away.

27. I almost shaved my entire bush off the other day. Not because of mania, but because of boredom.

28. One thing Nadia did for her birthday was make these pamphlets updating people on her life. I really loved it. It was incredibly endearing.

29. When you whittle down your circle, you become intentional about yourself, your space, and your time. It has felt confusing to shrink in one way but expand in many others.

30. If I don’t tell the world what I am up to, am I really up to anything?

31. I love being a Cancer. I love the summer. I hate heat-induced diarrhea.

32. My brother and I text for the first time in years. Sometimes I can barely recognize him. Other times, when he corrects me, I see he is right there in front of me— the same guy yelling at me to stop borrowing his band T-shirts as we passed each other in the hallway at school.

33. I am anti-capitalist, but I am also a maximalist. I blame this on having my Moon in Gemini.

34. The intention was never to make me feel exploited, but in the end, that is what happened in a lot of my relationships. It is a strange disorienting feeling to be left after doing so much, only to have all of that viewed as nothing. I was there. I know it was something.

35. This is the year I finish my second novel, get an agent, and go to a gun range for the first time.