The week I turned 21
there is no winner here
The night I turned 21 I ate cheesecake on the floor with my roommate and my little sister and drank grocery store wine and my free birthday Dutch Bros spiked with vodka until the room started spinning. We didn’t have any birthday candles so I held a mini soy candle above the cheesecake and accidentally blew it out with my laughing. I had purple hair and wore a maroon sweater, corduroys, and a gold star choker that’s broken now. Those corduroys don’t fit me anymore and my hair is back to brown and I don’t know what happened to that sweater.
I didn’t go out because most everything was shut due to Covid, and also because I couldn’t go to class without having a panic attack, and also because I don’t really like going out anyway.
The memory is fuzzy with neon bliss, like many drunken nights tend to become after you hurdle the hangover-induced anxiety and regrets. I’m pretty sure I went to class the next morning, double-masked and unbearably anxious. I was in choir that fall, and there were seven of us. We sang in separate practice rooms while watching each other on Zoom and pretending it was okay this was the closest to in-person we could get.
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The week I turned 21 was bookended by two trips home, the most frequent since I had started college. The second was planned—a birthday celebration with the family, the first was not—a rush home prompted by the stroke and fall my lola had at my uncle’s house. That memory is sharp and drained of color, a harsh counterpart to what would come two days later. In my recollection these two events are weeks apart, as they surely must have been, given the stark contrast in emotion, but Google Photos tells me otherwise. The twelfth—a hazy celebration-turned-escapist fantasy. The tenth—a blur of all sharp edges, drained of contrast and punctuated by a crisp October wind.
We weren’t allowed to go in, but lucky for us Lola had a room on the ground floor, window facing out to the courtyard. We wore our masks anyway and stepped off the path to say hi through a speakerphoned call with our mom, the only one allowed in. It was Dad’s day off. We brought her favorite Filipino food and hoped she’d eat that day. She wished me an early happy birthday and told me to study hard. I wore an old camp counselor sweatshirt—this I remember because my mom took a photo before we left. Everybody say cheese.
I don’t know how I drove back safely that Sunday, sobbing as I wove down the freeway in the pouring rain and dark.
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The Sunday after, I returned home to a spread of charcuterie and spinach artichoke dip—this I was reminded of via Google Photos, god bless her—and a cocktail mixed by my dad. We had a belated birthday celebration at the house. To be honest I don’t remember much else from that weekend besides the fact I was gifted a portable composter for my back porch. I suppose all the storage space had been taken up already.
Not long after, Lola moved in with my family where she could be more easily cared for. As a student a state away, I had the luxury of leaving paired with the guilt of not staying. Cue the weekends of grocery store wine and shots of cheap liquor until everything softened. Why shouldn’t an altered state be the reality when the alternative is facing the loneliness there is to be felt from the outside?
It feels heartless and attention-seeking to have felt such a thing when the rest of my family’s reality was the much more vivid pain of pleading with her twice daily to take her meds and explaining once again why her PT was important. The glimpses I caught on my visits home only amplified my guilt for not being there, despite it clearly being a miserable experience for everyone. Please, Mom, it’s important, my dad would say over and over as she shook her head and firmly pushed her lips together.
I hadn’t uttered this to anyone other than my husband or my therapist until I told my sister two months ago as we sat in the car outside her dorm listening to epiphany by Taylor Swift. It feels like you all grew together, and I’m just stuck on the outside, I told her. The nearest I’ve ever gotten to voicing what I’m most afraid to say.
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And now I’m caught in a loop of who I was and who I’ll never be again. I told myself Just make it through the week long enough to pay the next month’s bills and suddenly I’m not 21 anymore—I’m 24 and Lola has been dead for two years which means it’s been two years since I had a panic attack in the church bathroom after her funeral because I led the hymns and the communion song went wrong and two days after I saw her in the rehab center looking so small I turned 21 and tried to find solace in swirled cheesecake and whipped cream vodka. A memory so sickly sweet and bordered by moments I will write about forever.
I cannot listen to folklore without thinking of her and the drive back home when she passed. Of course we were listening to epiphany when we found out and of course I was the one driving and had to pull over at the soonest rest stop to switch.
I cannot think of her without thinking of heaven and how staunchly I avoid thinking about its existence, or rather, the belief in its existence.
It’s all gotten caught and tangled in this knot of Christmas tree lights that lives in my chest and flickers intermittently, though always when epiphany comes on. If I didn’t dance so lightly around it, I’d explore the idea of her watching these words all unfold in between spectating tennis matches of the greats of different times. To begin to untangle I have to entertain the possibility of it all being bigger than I’ve made it.
I spent so many nights trying to pull myself away from the reality I was not and could not be a part of, nights enshrined in murky memory, finally free of the fear that plagues me and the nagging feeling that I wasn’t doing enough. In her eulogy, my dad spoke about how thankful he was that my siblings and I had the privilege of getting to know his mom when, for most of our childhoods, she existed as a birthday card signature and a Walmart gift card sent from a two-day’s drive away. What a blessing it has been for her to know her grandkids.
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I don’t pull myself away and into the fuzziness very often anymore. Whether it’s a conscious, self-caring choice or the natural effects of growing away from 21 I can’t be sure. The irony is that I’ve downed a heavy pour of mid-shelf wine to help loosen this, let it all soak in dish soap and peel itself off from the sides of the pot until it forms a sentence on the surface of some overly-complicated alphabet soup I can’t seem to swallow. Maybe I light a candle for my twenty-four-year-old self; I didn’t have a birthday candle this year anyway. Wish that some part of this will detach itself from the rest and lessen the burden of such a flickering mess of obscurity.
It doesn’t seem fair that in order to reconcile my experience during the last year of my lola’s life I have to reopen the locked vault of Catholic indoctrination and utter contradictions. Though nothing is fair and I remind myself of this weekly.
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My anger at myself has subsided and I know it’s due to the wine. I’ve been on the edge of tears for two hours and I know I shouldn’t stop it when it comes. The unfearing me would say this all aloud, but the mere idea of them is distant and incomprehensible.
I understand now the solace found in hymns. Rote predictability to fall upon when no words of your own come. It would be so easy to fall into prayer here, collapse into the canopy of the divine. The most tender me aches for this, a moment of breath in which it’s not all mine to carry. The fearing me counters with the almighty, omnipotent, all-powerful god that ruled my psyche for twenty years. There is no winner here. There is only mourning for the grandmother I never really knew and the self I was so eager to run away from at 21. Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? Let it echo in my mind until I fall asleep as the bedroom spins, forgetting the tangles and contradictions in my chest. Maybe I will dream as an unfearing me who has the courage to profess all the ways I’ve been cast aside.
