Today I turned twenty-three. My birthday isn’t for several months yet, but now when I think of how old I am, the number twenty-three is the number I know. For weeks now, whenever I thought of how old I was, I had to do mental arithmetic every time. That was tiring. I was trying to reconcile two contradictory facts. This is better. I’ve discarded one as untrue.

As of today, I am twenty-three. Should anyone ask, that is what I will say: twenty-three. Not twenty-two, which is a strange and invisible age to be, transparent and thin.

I was twenty-two from the months January to December inclusive, and it was a good year. Anger clarified, grew still.
I began it with a cautious disclaimer I know what I want, the things that make me. This will probably change, tomorrow, next week. But for now, just now, I know.
Twelve months later, I still knew. Somehow. Lack of experience, yes granted and admitted, notwithstanding, I had enough anger to sustain the work I was doing internally, not entirely consciously. The writing wasn’t lying - the effort of writing, anyway. The words themselves were meaningless, irrelevant. But the effort I was making wasn’t lying or over-compensating. It was groundwork, bare architecture, a solitary nakedness.

Foundation in place, I turn twenty-three in one step. Now I do not have the luxury of twenty-two’s half-consciousness. This is the year for moving horizons, forcibly shifted. For this, I need to be fully awake, to be cautious and afraid too, but undaunted despite myself.

The I-beams show and the empty window frames. The caved doorways and the floorless ground. Their nakedness gleams in the light, still in their calm anger. But now is not the time to dwell on their stark lines or wonder at the wide spaces that spill through. This happens, this wonder, can happen only in retrospect. I cannot afford to become nostalgic for the future now, must not allow myself to preempt my own endings, cannot write off my twenty-third.