Stare at the Stars & Eat the Scallop, Will You?

Twenty-four still feels like a new age, but it’s been three months. Eventually I have to stop saying “I just turned twenty-four.”

I’m trying to write. My instinct is always that I won’t remember unless I write it down, but, Kate, you have a mind! You have a body! You’ll remember. Some, at least. 

I often find myself treating life like research—taking photos, writing things down with context. I’m just not sure who I am researching for. 

I’ve been vegetarian for ten years now, maybe more, and once this Spring I got pretty drunk and ate a scallop with my father. I’ve decided that that is important to do sometimes. Ten years is crazy though. I think I will always feel like I’ve been vegetarian for just six years. It’s almost too much to keep track of my age and the years I haven’t eaten meat.

My hair is longer than it has been since I was sixteen and technically I have the same face but it doesn’t feel like the same face. You know? Sixteen feels like just a few years ago, but my cheeks are different, my tooth chipped, bangs covering my forehead. It’s all the same though, my teeth, my tongue, my skin, my lips. I haven’t broken the habit of picking my nails. I guess my nails are new, but I still don’t let them grow. 

I’m aging and I can see that. I didn’t think I would notice it though. I’m not sure how I imagined it, but I didn’t think my body would start to feel less resilient or that my under eye bags would be more apparent and the few new freckles I get every summer would stop being silly new additions and instead be skin damage. I don’t think I feel bad about any of it. I take the stance that aging is beautiful, it’s just new. I know I am young, and yet young people age too. 

If young people didn’t age, no one would weather as they got older. Slowly my skin will loosen, my joints less cushy and sweet. My tattoos more blown out and maybe my hair thinner. Some scars will probably go away and new scars will claim their land. It’s fun though, my skin and body like changing landscapes. Like a funny shaped rock or bendy tree from years of storms and wind and injuries. I really love beer now too and I can’t get enough mango sorbet with chocolate chips. I learned to love red wine and then I stopped drinking red wine because I think that’s why I was throwing up so much. But, also I’m just getting older and I can’t hold my alcohol as well. 

I had an IUD in my body for five whole years, and recently I got it taken out (only after it was well expired and I worked up the courage to find a gynecologist within my insurance). I said I am not getting a new one, she said “to be sexually active and not on birth control, is to be preparing for a child.” 

I didn’t tell her that I wished to understand my cycle more, that I wished to have my body more synced with my mind and emotions. I didn’t think she would care. I could have told her that I had a severe eating disorder when I was younger and never really had a period until I was eighteen. I could have told her that the last time I bled without birth control I was twelve years old. I would like to know my period as a woman, and let my body breathe. I’m not anti birth control at all, I just want to see what my body is like. 

~

Twenty-four feels much older than sixteen and while I think I like my face alright, I don’t always find myself very beautiful. Not in a self-hate kind of way, just sometimes I just get bored of it and it’s hard to find something you’re bored of beautiful. I still take self timer photos of my body in silly positions with my socks pulled high and take self portraits when I get my haircut. In some positions I look very tattooed, but with a slight change you can’t see any tattoos. I think I look weird more often now but really almost like you are so used to your own face that you stop seeing it. I imagine it like when you live in a place with sought after views or when you get used to the taste of hard water. Not that my face is like amazing mountains or like hard water. It’s like you know too well what you look like and what you have looked like that you start to see yourself warped with weird features that don’t feel like yours. Like when you see a word you know very well, but you look at it too long and you stop recognizing it as if you don’t speak the language. Or, when you say it out loud too many times and it starts to sound funny and heavy in your mouth. I guess that’s cyclical though, if you don’t find yourself beautiful because you are bored of the same face, but then you look at it for so long that it appears foreign. Wouldn’t that mean that it feels like something new and therefore you can see it like the first time? 

~

I have ink on my skin and more scars on my hands. My name is the only name on my apartment lease and I have a car that could in theory carry my future dog or children. I won’t think that far ahead though. Past lovers have never been into my apartment, never heard my bedroom floors creak, or seen where the direct sunlight likes to land in my living room. A past lover would not even know what car I drive. If they saw my car pass by, they wouldn’t even know to look for me.

I parted ways with my car quickly, unexpectedly. They said “You can go clean out the Subaru now.” “Oh, okay.” I didn’t think too hard because I didn’t want to cry at a car dealership in North Hollywood in front of the salesman that was very old and kept hitting on my mother. I didn’t know if I would cry, but I didn’t need to find out. I pushed aside all of the tastes and flashes of the summer after college when I sat in my car for the first time. Of stopping at Waffle House on the road trip back to Boston. I wouldn’t let him drive one moment of the two day road trip because I was too nervous about something happening (to the car that is). Because we were so tired, I drove recklessly at night in pouring rain. Street lines were something for the imagination. I fought off thoughts of running through rain in the parking lot of a grocery store so we could get things for dinner once we were home. Figuring out how to mount my front license plate and seeing many orange tickets on my windshield. Holding friends safely as they scream-sung out the window. Their words trailing behind us immediately. Having the freedom to drive to Walden Pond whenever I wanted to. Fitting my kitchen table into the back of it perfectly. Spending a third of my savings to ship it to Los Angeles just for it to have to be in the shop immediately after getting there. That car is just an object, a machine, but it represented so much freedom to me and so much adulthood. It was a safe place to hang out, it let me go anywhere, it was how I made California feel comfortable. I familiarized myself with the city through my car. It was mine when I moved across the country and had my first big heartbreak and started my first major job and everything felt so unfamiliar and so insane and unmanageable and yet everyday I got up and I got in my car. 

Once again, it’s an object. I will make more memories in my new car. But, it was another first for me. Another first of my 20s. My first car leading me to my next “first”—the first car I bought on my own. 

~

When I was little I had a couple of birthdays that I asked for no gifts. I said, “Please donate to the Elephant Sanctuary instead.” They do not allow visitors, but I would have been a really good one if they did. I got their newsletter and kept up with all the elephants that roamed their land. I tested the knowledge I read in books about distinguishing the African elephants from the Asian elephants. I read about the favorite foods of each elephant and looked at their live cameras to catch a glimpse. Isn’t that so crazy? There is just an elephant in Tennessee hanging out and I’m looking at it from my family’s desktop computer in a state next door. 

I don’t think I even thought of what it would be like to be twenty-four at that age, but I think it’s silly to think of little me knowing that ten years later, I’d still wonder about those elephants and look them up from time to time to see if I could catch a glimpse of them on a the live cameras. 

~

Maeve, living alone, calls me for moral support to kill a spider. I giggle and tell her to imagine that someone told her they didn’t think she would kill a spider. Friends as support, competition as motivation. Barely 30 minutes later I pick up my sponge to do dishes and a cockroach runs out of my sink at a speed faster than I am okay with. My stomach recoils. Mother nature watches and lovingly laughs. She says “See there are things you are freaked out by too.” I didn’t think I was better or more confident than Maeve; I really didn’t. Spiders just don’t freak me out as much. But, Mother Nature made sure I knew to not get too comfortable because she could challenge me too. I had three failed attempts to hit the cockroach on my counter (the sole of my shoe created a triangle with the corner of my counter, perfectly protecting the roach as it ran). It fell off the edge of my counter and took shelter under my vacuum. In a split second the easiest thing I could imagine to do was press “on.” I took it’s life in a rather gruesome way that left my hands and shoes clean. Although, I do need to clean its remains from the base of my vacuum. 

I brutally killed this bug out of fear, but when I found a bee dead in my room I placed it on top of the books on my dresser. It’s been there for months—for some reason it feels so sad to throw it away. How does that work? Ethically, I mean?