seams (and apologies)

Since it has been 100000000 years since I last posted a blog entry, and my birthday is tomorrow, and I seriously need to update before midnight because it is shameful that I have waited even eight days to write a blog entry after my last one -- I am posting this essay that I wrote for English class last year that I might write a little more about tomorrow after I experience this birthday phenomenon again.  I wrote this a little less than a year ago, so quickly, before it loses relevance, I am posting it on my blog :) Hope all of you have not lost interest in the midst of my crazy busy life, swim practice, swim meets, and failure to do blog posts, and I am so sorry that I have been so bad at posting entries lately.

Seams

I wake up the morning of December 24, 2009, the pallid winter sun knocking on my eyelids, and I realize that I am sixteen years old.  Sixteen. I try on the number for size. It is made of different letters, but the fit is exactly the same as fifteen – which, when I think about it, had the same fit as fourteen, and thirteen, and every other number before it. But now, when I try these old numbers on, they squeeze and constrict in all the wrong places. How did I not feel myself getting bigger?

As I look back on my life as the sixteen-year-old that I now am, it strikes me how much I have changed. Not only have my arms and legs stretched like taffy, but somehow, I feel much bigger, in another way. It is as if with the passing of time, layers upon layers of paint have been applied to my surface, and eventually I begin to look different. But just like the stretching of my limbs, it is impossible for me to make note of these changes as they happen – never have I woke up feeling distinctivelynot-me, not even on a birthday like today.

The closest I have ever gotten to feeling different, older, on any Christmas Eve is simply feeling that I ought to feel such things. After all, a birthday is nothing but a landmark in the grand scheme of things, but it is not a landmark at which I can pause and take a breath. I will wake up tomorrow in the same way that I did today, and I will be sixteen-plus-one-day, and I will feel the same that I do right now.

When I look back at my life with from my sixteen-year-old perspective, it strikes me how many layers of paint have been applied since the days of my past – and as every reminiscence gets closer and closer to right now, to today, to December 24, 2009, I fit inside each Celia I regard better and better. I am not sure when the seams of myself start to pull and tear when I try to fit, but by the time I reach fourteen, I am already trying to force myself into something that is, simply put, far too small to contain me.

But when I imagine occurrences and events that happened when I was smaller, suddenly I can slip into each and every version of myself as if I have not grown one inch. In my memory, I fit. I fit. I shrink; I am not sixteen. I am fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve; I am six, I am four. I am any number, every number. I am transported back to the very moment that I remember; I am reliving it. And I fit.

I wake up the morning of December 24, 2009, the bright winter sunshine filtering through my translucent eyelids, awakening my consciousness and memory, and I realize that I am the very same Celia that was born sixteen Christmas Eves ago. I feel like that same Celia. And though my limbs have stretched; though layers upon layers of paint have been applied every single day for the past sixteen years; though I am a work in progress, I will always be Celia, the same Celia, and in my memory, each version of myself will forever fit me like a glove.