28 years ago today, I was cut out of my mother’s stomach. I
was headed out the vagina feet first, which isn’t usually recommended.
Legend has it that my father turned white as a ghost. My mother said that after
she knew I was okay, she thought that she might die, but that it would be okay
because I was already born.
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| Mother, Sister, Me. All of us born. |
I heard of a pregnant lady who’s getting a planned c-section
this Thursday, on Halloween. A Halloween Caesarean. I feel like if it were my
caesarean, I’d pick another day.
Today, I am overwhelmed with Facebook, text, and other
digital birthday love. Even Google seems to know that it’s my birthday. There
are colourful cupcakes and cakes on the homepage. Thank you Google, but thank
you more to all the other real people I’ve met in real life and who remembered
me.
On the bus this morning, I decided I would make a clichéd
list about things that make me old.
1. A small bunion is growing on the inside of my left
foot. Despite years of diligently spreading my toes barefoot or wearing
devastatingly practical shoes. Also, I think spider veins on my legs are in my
near future. So be it. My short shorts aren’t going anywhere.
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| Long Live the Kino Shorts |
2. I like to go to bed at 9 P.M. Even better is to go to bed
at 8 P.M. and read library books until I fall asleep. Conversations after 9
P.M. exhaust me. Parties are the worst. No part of my body can make peace with
why I am upright, awake and speaking. My bedtime is geriatric.
3. I hate the people on the bus who blast horrible music through their
headphones with the arrogant assumption that I might like to hear their lyrics
word for word. One afternoon I asked some dude on the 80 if he might like to
mute the video game music that was massacring my ears. He looked at me
with enormous disdain and called me a stupid fucking c-word. So now, on the
bus, I say nothing. I sit, sighing, glaring and shaking my head like a seething
eighty-year-old woman.
And that’s it. Otherwise, I am not very old. I look back on
words and photographs from every year of my life, and even from last week, and
I think, what a baby, you’re so young. As though the person looking back is so
wise and aged. A week later, a year later it will be the same thing. Me looking
at me, so young.
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| Me, taking action, getting action, 27 years old. |
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| Me nasal-flossing in Miami, 26 years old. |
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| Me and my sister at the Halifax Harbour. 26 years old. Very sophisticated. |
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Me, 16, reading Amelia Bedelia at summer camp.
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