29

On birthdays and the theoretical framework of time

There is both sacredness and horror in growing older. Today, I turn 29 and begin the 30th year of my life. I’ve always liked the number 29, felt that it resonated with me as most odd numbers do, and even kept thinking I was 29 for the past two months. My 30th year feels like it is already part of my story, and theoretically it is. Recent quantum research shows, through particle behavior, the evidence of negative time supporting the theory of retrocausality, which suggests future events can effect the past or present. Time doesn’t flow forward but loops and folds back on itself — a multidimensional echo of the past, present, and future coexisting all at once within our reality.

It’s my birthday. It should be a happy day, and it is. I promise, it is. I’ve always been big on birthdays, never dreaded getting older. I usually have a multi-day celebration planned and executed, and this year is no different. Yet, oddly, in the midst of my heart floating higher than our ringing laughter, I find myself thinking a lot about my friend. He wasn’t really my friend at the end because we hadn’t spoken in two years. Nothing happened; we just drifted apart with distance and time. There’s an undefinable ache in outliving someone that was a part of your story when you were 17. The brink of change. On New Year’s Eve, the last day of 2024, I went to my friend’s funeral. Towards the end, they played a song that he had written, played, sung, and recorded. Spinning his voice and love into the present. Music, as an act of paradox and defiance. Even daring to defy death. He passed away 19 days after turning 29. In 20 days, I’ll be older than he ever was. Than he ever got to be.

As Harry Styles sings in his new song “Paint by Numbers”: You’ve got to wonder if there’s a reason to believe / It’s a lifetime of learning to paint by numbers / And watching the colors run. Which is to say, I’m someone who has always defined her life in numbers, by a string of numbers like a constellation woven into the sky of my life. Because you can take the girl out of engineering, but you can’t take it out of her. It’s seared into my veins, an unending swell in my bloodstream like music. On Friday, or step one of my birthday weekend, I spent time with friends writing at the Chelsea Hotel (established in 1884) and stayed a little while longer after they left, reading with a glass of Bordeaux Orange catching the firelight of a candle burning hot near my hands, until the sky fell dark through the windows. On Saturday, I celebrated my birthday early again with friends at P.J. Clarke’s, which also opened in 1884. After dinner, a few of us ended up at an Irish pub in my neighborhood, and One Direction flooded the speakers twice. In both songs, you can hear Liam Payne’s voice, and it was like he’s still here. I forgot for 6 minutes and 39 seconds, that he isn’t. That he died two months before my friend did. I forgot, because why would he not be here. He’s right here, in my ears and reverberating off the walls of this pub. Forever young and ever-living through organized sound waves.

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe in synchronicities. Alignment in loss and numbers. We all have songs inside us. The moments of my life, and our lives, are interconnected in some divine way because it all has to mean something. Because why else, would I still be here, while he isn’t.

I don’t have the answers to whys of loss, but I do know what will fill the gaping, flaring holes it leaves behind in the fabric of our lives. I do know what will stitch us back together.

28 was an incredible year. There is so much I love about this impossibly gorgeous year of my life. I feel like I’m also celebrating 28 as I turn 29. Living has never felt as dreamlike as it did at 28. I took two screenwriting classes and started writing a screenplay for a feature film inspired by Past Lives and Before Sunrise. I finally had time to visit Europe for the first time. Two weeks in Paris, including a week-long writing workshop in the 1st arrondissement. Writing by hand in cafés. Escaping the afternoon heat into the verdant shade of Le Jardin des Tuileries, journaling there after a morning at the Louvre. A brief weekend love affair with a man I met while reading on the banks of the Seine on a Friday evening. He was a neuroscientist that was born in New York but grew up in Paris and had just returned to the city a few days before we met. Meeting two of my café-lover friends in-person for the first time in Paris. Visiting Brussels and Bruges in Belgium. Seeing Jimmy Eat World live my first night in Brussels, where they played the only song I listened to for a month after my friend died. My jaw dropped when they told us they’d been together as a band for 30 years. A week in London. Evita. My god, Rachel Zegler. And seeing Les Misérables onstage for the first time is something I’ll never forget. Walking around Marylebone and Hampstead Heath and sitting near the top of Primrose Hill—a string of cinematic scenes leading up to the moment I finally met two friends I used to write fanfics with when I was 15, at a sushi place in Camden. All of us grown in our diverged lives. I still think about that rhubarb cider I had when we relocated to a nearby pub. A week later, I watched Before Sunrise at the IFC Center for its 30th anniversary rerelease in June and passed by a photo of a young Ethan Hawke hung up on the wall on my way to the restroom after the film.

In the fall, I started the second year of my MFA Creative Writing program, from which I’ll graduate in less than two months. I finished two drafts of my first novel and started working on my second novel, both books pushing me into a headspace merging science and music with magic. My three great loves. After falling in love with poetry at 16 because of Ocean Vuong, Richard Siken, and Andrea Gibson, I finally had the chance to listen to Ocean speak about his writing in an NYU auditorium right outside Washington Square Park. Made new author friends and hugged an author friend who finally debuted. Got all dressed up to watch one of our MFA poetry professors debut and perform a pantoum she’d written along with an orchestra playing her composition. I went apple-picking for the first time. Hiked in Sedona for the third time in December. In September, I took a trip with my best friend for the first time, even though we’ve been friends since we were 12, to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, and Dublin. Embarked on a silly transatlantic flirtationship with a guy I met in Scotland, who’d also lived in New York in a past life, because why not.

28 was filled with a lot of firsts and effervescent repeats. Unashamedly, I saw Hadestown three times at the Walter Kerr Theatre with three different Orpheuses, my heart dropping to my stomach at the same moment every time. After seeing Moulin Rouge, I asked Jordan Fisher what he’s currently reading, and I remember the way his face lit up. I went to The Summer I Turned Pretty’s premiere of its final season at Bryant Park, a series that made me fall in love with love stories in middle school. I never outgrew that love; there are some loves you never outlive. I somehow barely missed running into Harry Styles four times in London and New York. Invisible string, it’s real. So fucking real. Everything somehow always leads back to New York, the city I looked to as a lighthouse when drowning in a stagnant life. The city I live in now.

On Saturday, several friends asked me what resolutions or goals I have for this next year and stage of my life. I had given them the practical real-life list: graduate with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction), get a job, get an agent, start running again. But what I didn’t share is that most of all, I want to love. To love my life, my people, new people, coffee, music, scientific discoveries, new literature, rereads, heartbreaks, all of it, even more. I’ll always look for connection and evidence. All the things that make this life worth living, all of that light and dark, I want to possess the spectrum of it. Devour it. Devote myself to it fully. Bear everything it gives me. There is no heartbreak without love.

It’s Monday now. March 30, 29 years past the day I was born. On Easter, a day of rebirth. Every birthday is a rebirth. Today, I’ll buy myself a mini cake from a French cake bakery I love in the East Village. I’ll write the rest of this essay with an iced bourbon vanilla latte, half-sweet beside my right hand. Then, I’ll meet with my MFA thesis group at Amélie in Greenwich Village to discuss the novels we’re working on over wine & petits plats and celebrate my birthday together for the third time in four days. These are the days I dreamed of for years. Life is so beautiful, I could weep. I probably will. Even with absence, there is so much presence. Hand-stitched and fated, colors inevitable and deepening. Here’s to another revolution around the sun. There is so much of life to be lived.