23

I’m twenty three years old today, somehow, and the years came and went in a flash. I can’t even believe it. It’s hard to wrap my head around.

Right now, I’m sitting in a room alone with one earbud in, listening to nothing but the rainfall outside. In this room, I’m surrounded by windows. It’s pouring outside—a gloomy day, but not an unwelcome one. I like the rain when I’m not caught in it. It makes home feel even more like home: safer, warmer, more secure.

The raindrops trickle down the windows. Runoff drips over the sides of the roof onto the concrete ground below. What are the sides of a roof called, anyway? I found myself contemplating this seemingly mundane question, only to come to the realization that I didn’t know something I now really and sort of stupidly wanted to know, so I looked it up.

As it turns out, roof vocabulary is ridiculously expansive, and there are tons of words describing each arch, each section, each hideously boring detail of a roof. As it turns out, the sides of a roof are usually just referred to as the sides of a roof—go figure. The supporting structures under the roof are called the rakes, which are right under that traditionally triangular paneling. I’ve never heard the word “rakes” used to describe the roof of a house in my life. Every time I’ve thought of a rake before, I’ve usually thought of little me using my parents’ humongous metal rake from the garage to put together a beautiful pile of orange and yellow leaves to jump into.

I think of all the words I still do not know. It’s easy to forget, sometimes, how little we know, how much more there is to learn when it’s so easy to feel so old, so nauseated with knowing as much as we do. I know it’s ridiculous to say I feel old at only twenty three, but I think I feel old only because internally, I am still outside, raking leaves, and I don’t quite know how to come inside and shut the door behind me for good. Internally, I am seven years old still. I am waiting to be shaken awake and told to get ready for school. I am waiting to see faces I may never see again. I am waiting, waiting, waiting for a day that will never come, a day long gone.

Maybe I don’t want to know what “rakes” are. Maybe I want rakes to stay the same. I want them to be what I knew them to be when I was a kid: large garden tools used specifically to play out in the autumn breeze, even when your dad tells you to put it down, it’s too heavy, and to use your toy rake instead. I want to draw the roof of a house on a piece of paper with crayons and have no clue what “rakes” are even as I draw them, unless I decide to draw the tool itself in the front of the yard of my crayon creation. Maybe, deep down, despite the hunger for knowledge I know I have, maybe I don’t want to know half of the things I know, or half of the things I will come to know.

But aging itself is knowing and learning, and I do know what rakes are. Rakes are garden tools, yes. They are also the sloping edges of a roof. I know this now. And I’m at peace with that.

All this to say, I guess aging is a bit like watching the rain. It’s bittersweet, as we long for those better, brighter, inaccessible days, but it isn’t at all unwelcome; it’s a gift. There’s a comfort to it, to the knowing, to the learning. To the opportunity to get to do so. And I am very, very grateful to get to do so.

♥️