XXIV

I didn’t know if I’d make it to twenty-four. I couldn’t tell if my heart had that many beats left in it. Some mornings I wake and am still shocked that God has gifted me with another sunrise; for many days there was a void where there should have been gratitude, there was a strangled cry where there should have been a hallelujah.

Many, many mornings I woke and violently cursed the breath from my lips and the rain from the Heavens.

But each time I stumbled from the sheets and accepted the hugs from my cat, I boiled the kettle and wrote up the almost-due essay. I fumbled my fingers through my hair and applied soft blush, ran a lap around the bay, lit up some coal and poured the vodka.

That’s the thing about life, it will cradle you even if you squirm.

I find it hard to celebrate and condemn myself simultaneously. But eighteen months ago I couldn’t even differentiate the two, so now I count the irony of their coexistence as progress.

Twenty-four feels fragile, like something really beautiful could grow from it.

I think about my revolves around the sun and all the different skins I’ve worn. I can recall every single one of my past selves, but I cannot always see how they birthed who I am in this moment. There are some selves that fill me with shame, some that were so cruel they make me wince. Some of my faces have been so distorted, so full of gore, that they are unrecognisable to me now. Hearts that have shattered in my wake and hands that have been left empty.

I have learnt a stark truth: that appreciating our mortality and pre-empting it are two different things.

In twenty-four years I am no wiser and also so much wiser than all the selves I have been. I look back at the me that was heart-broken, at me shuddering, at me sitting in a clinic. I look back at the me who waited with an aching heart in an empty house, cooking pumpkin soup and buying a couch. I look back at the me who sat straight in class and the me who cried at the psychic’s house and the me who decided to dye my hair red. I peel time back further and I remember the disco ball of my 16th birthday party, the me who leaned up against a cold wall for my first kiss. The me that fell in love with a tattoo artist who taught me about the underside of life, and the me who got a tattoo by someone else just to show him how nonchalant I could be. There was a self I inhabited who was so invested in bettering the world that she wrote a letter to the Prime Minister. A self that put her heart on a platter. A self that cut my best friends to shreds. In another flesh, I have been a ginormous spectacle and a patron of forgiveness and a silly little girl figuring it out as I go.

If I squint when I look back, I see all the joy that was woven in between everything that I had deemed unbearable. I see the day I met the tattoo artist, and his smile, and his patient urgency; the first date when he sang my favourite Nelly song; the story he told me about a time when he tripped and to spare himself embarrassment he exaggerated the trip and kept stumbling. I see how many delicious meals I made on cold nights in an echoing apartment. There was once a time when my world was crumbling but the concert was so loud, so warm, that my heart found its way back to my chest. A boy in a bar making me laugh wildly. A beach with a sunset so acute it lit the blood in my veins. Singing Zac Brown Band in the backseat of my car on a raining Sunday night, with a footballer I’d once drooled over in my teens. Hugging my favourite author. Easter show fireworks and his strong hand in mine, his shoulder so soft under my head on the train ride home. The country music channel blaring Alan Jackson. Wine-drunk belly laughs. Books whose pages I turned fiercely. Words I wrote hungrily. The roar of the stadium in the 80th minute of the grand final and that stranger in a matching jersey to mine who turned and gripped me in glee.

It has taken me twenty-four years to learn how to pray instead of beg, how to open my eyes and see the sunset, how to find balance between having a full heart and a quiet mind.

In all my selves, I have been obsessed with becoming someone, something, else. But now, I have a yearning desire to split everything inside me open just to inspect it all. In twenty-four years I have never been so adamant about spending time alone, I have never been so keen to trace all the rises of my flesh with my own fingers. This devotion to myself is the most divine journey I have ever been on. I go to bars and come home to an empty bed, and I don’t cry, I snuggle deeper into the sheets and I take up the entire space and I wonder how I ever craved a diluted love. I have never been so hungry for myself.

I am twenty-four years old and I have a lot to show for it: stretched-thin scars, candid love, a simmering heat.

I didn’t know if I would make it to twenty-four, but in this time I have found a deep reverence for all the mutations of pain. I have uncovered such a strong force in the pit of my stomach, and an aching power that I can access at any moment that urges my heart to keep beating. I have rediscovered ferocity and backtracked and tripped. But now I know that when I trip, all I have to do is keep stumbling. Add some grandiose kicks. Make light of it. Laugh and keep moving.

I have made it to twenty-four and now I aspire to be the kind of person who checks the weather forecast too late and doesn’t pack an umbrella, but shrugs with a smile and says, “Oh well.”