tick tock

It can’t possibly be true. There’s no way that I’m really 35 today. It must be some kind of mix up, some cruel calendrical confusion.

Last night I was talking to a novelist who, reflecting on his career, offhandedly noted, “life is long.” It instantly reminded me an ex-boyfriend who, reflecting on our years of mutual torment, used to coax me back into romantic revery by saying the same thing. At 25 it seemed true enough. At 35 it feels patently false. Those ten years, for instance, well, they’re gone. And save for a dozen new wrinkles, I have little account of them.

A dissertation? A PhD? Somehow they don't add up to a decade.

When I told the novelist that life felt anything but long, he said that having his two-year daughter changed his account of time. It reminded me that when you’re a child, each day and each year feels a like a century. Having a baby, he said, was like resetting your own internal clock back to a child’s time. I hope that’s true.

My celebrations today are modest. I bought a cheese danish that I’ve been thinking about since January. Each morning when I buy a desiccated, painfully healthy, whole grain roll, I longingly admire the cheese danish. In early February, I decided that I’d splurge on my birthday. And so it began: 3 months of cheese danish imaginings.



I think it might be perverse to dream about a danish for three months. It might be the sign of instability. Or it might just be a way to pass the days. Because that's what it feels like I'm doing here, at the end of this post-doc, passing the days, waiting to move on, to leave behind, to start again.

Mid-life is just time to do that.