And yet for all this sea-hoard of deciduous things

My birthday is tomorrow and I haven’t thought much of it, except in an abstract way. I’ll be twenty-eight. I don’t know how to feel about it - I’m getting older, obviously, but I think I've subconsciously decided to save all my aging-related dread for later, maybe thirty, maybe thirty-one. I feel the same as I ever have, maybe slightly sleepier and more ready to call it a night, but more or less I feel as I’ve always felt: like myself. I feel lucky in that way. Changes within myself don’t really feel like changes but more a continuation of whoever I am supposed to be, whoever the person it is that I will eventually arrive at being. None of the people I’ve been feel wholly foreign to me, but maybe that’s because I still am all of them. I’m still the four-year-old admonishing my mother for eating unhealthily, I’m still the nine-year-old hitting boys with my metal lunchbox, I’m still the thirteen-year-old going on and on about some fucking book (first it was The Count of Monte Cristo and then it was Pere Goriot) and lecturing my friends for reading Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging instead, I’m still the fifteen-year-old listening to twee pop in my bedroom, I’m still the seventeen-year-old ditching my AP Art History class to go to museums, I’m still the eighteen-year-old fundamentally unsure about everything but still going on like I’m not. All of the twenties Londons are still there, too, but they’re just distillations of teen Londons, really, with different boys, different music genres, different books, different ditching of one thing for another. Of course, though, there's been change - lots of it, and sometimes too much. The past two years especially have been trying, but despite that I’ve still been able to pop my head up amongst the muck and be here. And it’s alright, being here. I’m glad I am.

I will say this, though - the London who toyed with the idea of getting a tattoo of a line from an Ezra Pound poem? She’s gone.