A Love Letter to My Twenties
I picture decades like boxes, boxes filled with colors and songs and ghosts and versions of me that can’t fit into the next decade’s box. I left almost everything in the box of my first decade. I don’t remember being nine the way I don’t remember being three. My memories of my first decade are fragmented: crying at birthday parties, moving into new houses, meeting my baby sister, getting my first dog, my first big girl bed, my first CD player…
Then I reached my 10s, and that box was quickly crammed with poetry and puzzles and insults and road trips and crushes and sports and paintings and puberty. The box of my 10s was overflowing by the time I was fourteen. It’s difficult to believe that the eleven year old writing poems at the VFW with her grandma and the fifteen year old crying in a bathroom stall clutching onto the foreign object known as a tampon could exist in the same decade as the nineteen year old who crawled out of an abusive relationship. How could spelling bees and underpants printed with the days of the week exist in such close proximity to underage drinking tickets, police reports, desperate phone calls, car crashes, and armchairs of therapist offices?
By the time I reached my 20s I felt like I’d lived an entire lifetime. How do I keep going? What other hellscapes await me?
My 20s box came pre-filled with the sort of trauma that didn’t leave room for my VFW poems and CD players and day-of-the-week underwear. Turning 20 was like a hard reset. I didn’t know who I was or who I had ever been. And then the deaths I experienced almost immediately upon turning 21 nearly destroyed the box altogether.
But then, on one ordinary day that I can’t even pinpoint, I was born again. My 20s box slowly grew to fit everything: my first dog, my violin, my paintings, my poetry. Then came friends. The kind I had never had before. And the Special Olympics club I started. And the Deaf children I worked with. And the ceramic elephants and the tufted pillows and the handmade quilts that occupied my first “big girl” apartment.
By 24, I didn’t dread opening the box to add more things. I tossed in first dates and yoga mats and concert tickets and puppy toys and college degrees and waitress aprons and birthday parties and bridesmaids dresses, aware that trauma and desperation were buried at the bottom.
Nothing could have prepared nineteen-year-old Amy for her 20s. But fuck, am I glad she chose to keep going. My 20s brought me my soul dog. My 20s led me to my husband. My 20s saw thirteen countries, countless concerts, several weddings (including my own), and introduced me to people who remind me why simply existing is a luxury.
Last time I entered a new decade I was so sad and scared. I know I’ll look back on 30-year-old Amy and feel this same overwhelming empathy for her, too: She has no idea how good life is about to get. I’m glad nineteen-year-old Amy was brave enough to open another box. I’m grateful my 20s allowed me to fill it with such beautiful things.
It is such a privilege to age, to fill our lives with such meaningful contents.
