Birthday Time Capsule

It is the eve of my 21st birthday. I watched a movie, a good movie I
bought yesterday. I laughed with my brother's girlfriend about her
broken sandal. I talked to my bestfriend about tomorrow's birthday
festivities. I'm wearing my purple silk pajamas with the matching robe.
I burn incense and sit now with a rainbow blanket on my lap, the same
one the graced the back of my white rocking chair when I was nine. It
is the eve of my 21st birthday and I am alive.

I take a deep breath and look at pictures on my corkboard, pictures of
my life. My dog, my brother, my mother and father, my friends stare
back at me. I see my bestfriend and I in the 12th grade, shes hugging
me as I laugh with my eyes closed. I'm bedecked in a pink pinstripe
suit in Mrs. Bailey's biology lab. A two-year old blonde girl holds her
blonde little brother. H holds a blue bottle. I'm wearing a red
nightgown and undoubtedly telling him I love him in some inaudible baby
language. These are my life, Thanksgiving pictures with my mom and
photos at Newport Creamery. Pictures of my brother and I with our
parents when I was eight, pictures of my friends at playgrounds.
Tomorrow we will make more pictures. It's the eve of my 21st birthday
and I am alive.

My teddybear looks at me from across the room. He's matted and missing
his nose, his once sparkly ears and feet sparkle no more. He's mashed
and mushy, a far cry from what he was when I got him in the sixth
grade. My friends and I had a yard sale in the driveway. The only
business we got on my dead end dirt road was the ice cream man. Mostly
my friends and I traded goods. I got the teddybear for a giant red
M&;amp;M which dispensed candy. Since then I have slept with him
most nights. He's been to Canada, Florida, Virginia and Provincetown.
I'm twenty now and the only nights I don't sleep with him are the
nights I don't sleep alone. Tonight I will go to sleep twenty and
holding that rat of a teddybear and tommorow I will wake up twenty-one
holding him still. It's the eve of my 21st birthday and I'm
alive.

Twenty years. If I live to be eighty that's a quarter of my life. I've
gone to school. I've gotten a driver's license and bought a house and
provide a home for my brother and my dog and his girlfriend and myself.
I have had boyfriends and one night stands and gotten my heart broken
and broken hearts and written poetry and passed out at a prom dress
fitting. I have had two jobs and screwed up doing them both up and I
have impressed bosses and proven to be punctual if nothing else. I have
been to both edges of my sanity and wound up looking back at the other
edge and would have jumped off if I could have without winding back up
where I started from long ago. I have lied and I been honest and I have
read books and cried at movies andnever left a restaurant without
paying the check and leaving a good tip. I have peed my pants and
watched my mother kill a bee that had stung me seven times under my
shorts with her bare hands and I have seen my father drunk and my
mother drunker yet. I have lived in four towns and four houses moved
three times and have heard my brother have sex with his girlfriend and
have been strangely unbothered by it. It's the eve of my 21st birthday
and I'm alive.

I wonder if I'd choose to know the future if it were possible. I fear I
might do it because the temptation would be far greater than my will. I
know I'd wind up sorry I had and am thankfull this option does not
exist. I still wonder though, sitting here tonight. I wonder what I'll
be when I grow up, if I'll be a philosopher or if I'll be a writer or a
real estate tycoon or a politician or a waitress or a veteran bank
teller. I wonder if I'll leave the place where I've grown up or if any
of the people I know now will still be known to me in fifty years, on
the eve of my seventy first birthday. I wonder if I'll ever meet the
right person at the right time in the right place. If that fate befalls
me I wonder if I'll know it's the right person and if he'll know it's
me. I wonder if theres heaven and hell or if there's nothing or if we
get reincarnated. My eyes hurt from the harsh fake light and my body
aches from the ten hours of standing I did today and my mind churns.
It's the eve of my 21st birthday I'm alive.

It's entirely possible that this will wind up in my memoirs or worked
somehow into the great novel I've been starting since I was eight on
the dock at my parent's old house. It is also entirely possible that my
kids will one day find this in a box in the garage and laugh at how
their mom use to be while never being able to imagine me as anything
but what they know me as. I wonder constantly about life and the past
and the future and what the tangles between them mean, so much in fact
that it just might detract from living my life outside of my head.
Right now though, sitting here with my rainbow blanket and silk pajamas
and long burnt out incense, I wish only to preserve how I feel this
very moment. Like the pictures on my corkboard I want to freeze time
and emotion and hold on to them forever. Like the timecapsules we made
in seventh grade to be opened at high school graduation, I want
something that lasts to remind me of myself tonight. I want to remember
the eve of my 21st birthday and how very alive I am.