27

June 1st, 2009

27 has a weight to it like those movies titled for a measurement of something. Seven pounds: the weight of a heart. 21 grams: the weight of a soul. 60 seconds: the amount of time it takes to steal a car. Freed from the haphazard adventures that 21 and 23 woke up from the night afterwards, 27 means something. It should be studied.

27. Twenty-seven. Its not one of those snappy happy words that add punch and poignancy to your diction. I say it and it slows me down. The knowledge of it soaked into my chest reveals itself in heaving eyebrows, wrinkles shaped like elevens between my eyes, the place where frowns form on the face. Eleven is the number that shows up on the back of the neck when you’re old enough to die. This I learned from a movie labeled “drama” and “rated T” when I was about 9. Rated T movies are ok for 9 year olds. Eleven is the age I saw my period for the first time. Living is counting.

At 27 years old, I just watched a movie called “27 dresses” about a woman who has become the perpetual bridesmaid, and never the bride. I am 27 and I don’t have a boyfriend. I’ve been to many weddings, but never a bridesmaid. Am I two lives away from becoming a bride? The man I want to marry doesn’t think me fit to spend the rest of his life with. He wants to date a 21 year old. In 1988, I was starting second grade.

This year, 2009, I was riding a bus full of obnoxious high schoolers when I realized that the lovesick ballads blasting on the speakers, music I grew up with and hummed the chorus on my head - Mariah Carey, Snoop Dogg, Alanis Morrisette - all cutting edge and dubbed devilish by the grown ups of my time, probably came out before these teenagers were born. Then I tallied the years since I started my first period, and realized that, if I wanted to or had been adventurous enough, I could have me a tall dashing sixteen year old son or daughter by now. That’s how old I am. I could be the mother of a teenager. He or she could help me carry my groceries, get a part time job after school to help with the bills, make me be a better person. I could be a grandmother. It suddenly seems that everyone around me is much younger than me.

I feel ancient. Like 45. Like I need to try. What saves me is the men who still look at me as if they would leave their wives for me. But I’m old enough to know they only want to get into my pants. Which would’ve been good enough at 24. But 27 is heavy like deadweight on loose leaves that would fly away diabolically the minute a breeze blows. The men who look at me are squared and subtracted from the whole of my worth.

I keep the windows open for ventilation in my bedroom. The winds make me feel mobile. I feel healthier. You can’t take health for granted at 27. You have to start thinking about things like antioxidants to reduce all the sun and chemical damage you did to yourself when you were a teenager, before you knew you could get old, before you counted.

In Freshman symposium, I announced proudly a new layer of truth: I was looking forward to getting old: to having wrinkles and telling my grandkids stories of my youth. I said this with the lightness and brevity of someone on the brink of self-discovery. Now that I am past self-discovery, and onto self-crisis, everything carries much more consequence. My grandmother died of a very painful cancer in her cervix. She was not a very happy woman for most of her life. She once called me the devil in hell. But someone told me that she asked for me on her dying bed. Perhaps it was the painkillers that set of an ethereal drizzle of memories of random people she knew. I wonder how light she felt at that moment? Or how heavy?

I’m 27 and I count everyday to measure my self worth. Have I done enough to justify the fibroids in my uterus? My doctors said it was not cancerous. But I don’t trust them. You don’t trust people at 27. By this age, I know that everyone, even experienced doctors who speak in Latin and wear cold white gloves that touch your breasts in sharp, precise drills, make mistakes. My mother died of cancer two years after the clinician who checked out her breast told her the lump was nothing to worry about. I was 22 then. To young to loose a mother, but old enough to understand the loss. I’m old enough to know that people make the wrong decisions about who they marry then divorce at 27. Kate Nash, who’s only 22, already knows we are never the people we turn out to be. I’m 27 and I’ve realized that I’ve lived my life counting.

24 was my golden birthday because I turned 24 on the 24th. It was the year I came into my own. It is the age I will always be in my head. I partied to punk music in basement pubs only bright enough to see the whites of the eyes of the person bobbing their head next to me. I drank champagne in bars where I knew the bartenders. I chose my favorite kind of martini and brand of Scotch. I had sex deliberately. I chose wisely. Except, now that I’m 27, everyone seems to want to remind me that I’m 27. According to the 27 year lore written in the book of the 27s, I am too old to apply for scholarships. I am too old to travel. I am too old to be careless with money. I am too old to be have dreams. I crave 24 when everything was still years away and hazy. I crave 24 when everything was possible. I crave 24 when college was only three years before, not six. I crave 24 when everything was lighter and longer-living.

At 27, I am half the age my mother was when she died. Casually skimming the scattered items in the kitchen cupboard, I strummed my fingers across bandaids, batteries, safety pins, and old bills before I uncover the picture of the younger sister of a friend. It is on the title page of a funeral book. 1979-2006. She was twenty-seven. I didn’t even know she died. I was probably in Japan or on my way to Korea stuffing my face with steaming pots of spicy street food. I was 24 going on 25. Actively living. She fell at the airport, and died in her sleep of a brain aneurism the next day. Arundhuti Roy had said that 33 was a viable dieable age. 33 was the age her mother died. Birth Youth has been nipped and tucked into inchaote stages of the 20’s. The baby fat still dripping from our beer-chizzled bodies, we don’t even know how young we are yet. 27 belongs to the hairier nether regions of the 20‘s. The deeper, darker half, closer to death.