On September 25th, I will have 26 years.
In other languages, when I've been taught enough of them to fulfill the college requirements, describing your age translates to "having" years. Instead of saying "I am twenty-six," in French it would be "J'ai vingt six ans," or "I have twenty-six years."
This idea is appealing to me. New. The concept of having years, of owning time, even if it is simply so by way of poor interpretation of the infinitive "to have."
So I have 26 years now, 5 of the most recent have been spent in New Orleans. This 5 years of time has been frozen in my memory. As long as I've lived here, when people have asked me, I have told them, "almost 5 years now." The time has been a solid chunk, never changing, never really increasing.
Even now, when I recall specific times since I moved here, or even the move itself, I have to create a long timeline in my head, dotted with all the changes of address, to iron out my memory.
In a way, I guess I want this time to be blurry because it never really belonged to me. Time in New Orleans reels back and lunges forward like the youngest slip of a harem being broken in on a bevvy of conventioners, passed back and forth among them like a communical bottle of whiskey. Well, maybe not that scandalous, but when you can only recall a clump of time from the insides of dimly lit bars and self-induced rehabilitation, time is allowed to be more dream-like, metaphorical.
Time is usually best kept for the forgetful by the birthdays of other people's children. And yet, I am only brought to remembering and then I am quickly brought back. And I keep wondering if time was meant to be this way, that in its passing only slivers of it remain and even then it is novel, a trinket you fight for in a crane machine only to throw it out months later when you turn 13 and are now too old for it.
This morning, I called Richard to see if he would need me today to work, as I need the money. He said no, that his store was short staffed and his wife just got back from the hospital, and he simply had no time. Here I am, all willing to work on weekends, and he doesn't have time. For some reason, after this, I make an effort to start Carson's car. It hasn't been starting for me, even though I've had magic fingers with it before (it needs a new ignition cylinder, for those that are familiar, and we are trying to get it replaced, bought the part, but the guy couldn't come out in time for Carson to make it to drill this weekend). Well, I noticed that for some reason, it had been parked in drive. Putting it in park and turning the key, it started up. I ran in to tell Carson and suggested that we run it to the lock place and leave it for them for Monday. Afterward, he gave me $20 so I could buy groceries for us. Winn-Dixie has company, a Sav-A-Center slowly taking form right next door. How rude and systematically cruel. Inside, it was like some apocolyptic rush hour for barbecue fixings, the register lines leaking into the aisles. I flipped through some girl's magazine and half heartedly read my horoscope for this month. Cancer's are bad for me. Oh well. I seem to fall for Cancers.