39
I turn 39 this month.
I have never been troubled about a specific birthday before. Some people struggle with the idea of turning 30 but I did not. 30 did not seem to portend the end of any possibilities in my life.
39, though.
I do not like the idea of turning 39, the idea that my 30s are almost over and that there is still so much of certain types of life that I have not had nearly enough of. 39 feels like a gate that’s starting to close.
In the game Night in the Woods (or at least the demo I played of it last year), recent college dropout Mae says, “Everything is ending, but I want more.”
And I think that’s a perfectly understandable feeling, maybe even an expected feeling, for someone at that stage in life, that late-teens/early-20s period of transitional uncertainty. But some self-critical part of myself feels like it’s inappropriate for me to be feeling, on the brink of 39, that everything in my life ends before it even begins and I want so much fucking more.
More dancing.
More late-night conversations over drinks with friends and lovers. More love. More touch. (A lot more touch. I wake up feeling starved for touch.) More travel. A person to travel with. A person with whom to play the scary games that destroy me too much when I play them alone. A person to face those fears with in reality. A witness to my life. A person for me to witness, and support, and be proud of. A person who is proud of me. A person to argue with about the things that matter to me most. A person to stand on hotel balconies in other cities with, who just by being there, affirms that my life is worth witnessing. A person who I like being with so much that we don’t even have to do those things. As Lloyd says of Diane in Say Anything–Lloyd who knows that a particular person is worth devotion from him and that most people aren’t, that people are not interchangeable–“We wouldn’t even have to go out, man, we’d just hang out.”
39 seems to say that it’s time to let go of certain hopes you had for yourself, certain kinds of life that one associates more with people in their 20s and early 30s than with people in their 40s, that it is time to peacefully accept the things you won’t have and find joy and satisfaction in the things that are available to you. But I don’t know if I can do this. I don’t think I can stop wanting the things I want, the life I still haven’t lived.
In her essential book All About Love, bell hooks writes:
When I was approaching the age of forty and facing the type of cancer scares that have become so commonplace in women’s lives they are practically routine, my first thought as I waited for test results was that I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been seeking.
I understand this completely, and I feel like I’ve already lost way too much time and missed out on so much that I don’t need a health scare to make me realize how urgent it is. Hooks writes of graffiti she saw every day on her walk to work that read, “The search for love continues even in the face of great odds.” And so it does.
I went on a camping trip this past weekend and even just having a person there to talk to each night, to take stock of the day with, to process with, to open up to, made me more aware of how I’ve been changed by three-thousand nights without that kind of presence. There were things even today that I wanted to share with someone but couldn’t. Joys and setbacks. I know sometimes I write about things here just because I don’t have a you to share them with. But it’s not the same.

The Lunchbox
I’ve basically been single for my entire 30s. The lack of love changes you as surely as love does. But now I’m so scared, too. Scared that I’ve been alone for too long. I know I have so much to offer the right person but I’m scared that I have no idea how to give it to them.
I was at a party last month talking to two married women whose husbands both travel a lot for work, and they talked about the feeling, the strange sad feeling they sometimes get in their homes when their partners are away, and I thought, I can’t even imagine what that’s like. Being alone is so normal to me now that I can’t fathom what it’s like for another person’s presence to be part of one’s home. And yet at the same time, my time alone has taught me very well that another person’s presence is the only thing that can make a place a home.
Someone says times are rough. That it’s tough to keep hope alive. I know it. I want to be there for them, hold them up. I want to help and be helped. As Masha writes at the end of her book Love Dog, “I want to be saved. Not in the way men are supposed to save women. But in the way we are supposed to save each other.”
Someday, with/by/for someone. Someone worth being devoted to.


Broken English
I have tried being with a person just to be with a person. Just to not be alone. I can’t do it. I am constitutionally incapable of that kind of settling. Masha once wrote of “People who are like forbidden cities. People who only love people who have the key to them. People who unlock each other.”
“I want to be hidden from everyone but you,” she wrote. “I want you (whoever you are) to find me.”
And I don’t know how to be with a person who does not have the key, or the password. Someone who does not make me glad to be in the moment with them, and no longer dwelling on the years that came before.
I like the color of your hair
I think we make a handsome pair
I can only see my love growing
I like the way this is going
I like to watch TV with you
There’s really nothing that I would rather do
Then maybe we can go to bed
And get up and do it all again
I don’t care about the past
None of it was made to last
It’s not who you’ve known but who you’re knowing
I like the way this is going
I am still 23. I cannot stop wanting the things I want. Maybe next year I will be happy to be 40, but for now I am still 23.
In my mind a scene kept playing where I saw you, because you’d asked me to see you, knowing that I would say yes, knowing that I want to see you. And when, in my imagination, I see you, across the table at a bar, my heart cracks open as it always does, and I want to say “How are you?” which is all I really care about. I want to know what’s going on in your life. Well, no. I want more than that. I want to share in it in some sort of meaningful way. I want to be a priority to you and to be able to treat you like the priority to me that you’ve always been. But instead of saying “How are you?” I act guarded, I keep my distance, I pretend, and I hear myself say “What do you want?” And I don’t like myself for saying it. But maybe I’m worried that you just want to see me so that you can say goodbye, and you already know that I really don’t like saying goodbye to you. So I say “What do you want?” I could never imagine what you would say in response, so it always ended there.
Caro with the chip on her shoulder about not being seen as a woman by everyone all the time. Caro with the chip on her shoulder about having been single for so long. People say there’s a warm loving soul underneath but sometimes I start to doubt it myself. I need something more.
Use it or lose it.
“The search for love continues even in the face of great odds.”
Notes
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griffinsierra said: Just hit 43 myself in August. The numbers don’t change you. Only experience does that. I keep wishing…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlv23UWCRM0
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portrayt reblogged this from itsskoots and added:
This. This so much. I’m not yet turning 39 or anywhere near it, but what is said about love and the fear of being alone...
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