New York, day 11

“Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went ‘but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,’ and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” – Joan Didion, ‘Goodbye to All That’

I’m going to be twenty-two tomorrow! When I was browsing in Little Marc Jacobs this weekend, one of the employees kindly informed me that their sizes went up to age fourteen, so if I wanted to try anything... Needless to say, I myself am in a bit of disbelief about what my real age is. It is hard to know how to feel in a city where you could legally be drinking but most people assume you’re newly in your teens. Last year when I went to get tickets to go to the Central Park Zoo, the woman asked if I would be buying a child’s ticket. The first year I ever went to New York I was nineteen and boarding the plane by myself at six in the morning, and the custom’s officer (jokingly) asked if I was running away from home. This city makes me feel both really young, and in some ways older than I am.

For my last day of being twenty-one I decided to take a ballet class at Steps. (Ironically, seeing as I went there after I wrote the first part of this post, the woman at the front desk asked how old I was. The minimum age for their open drop-in classes is twelve. I’m afraid she believed there might be a chance I was not yet twelve.) What an amazing place! I wish I’d gone sooner. (That’s always how I end up feeling when I put things off because I’m nervous then realize that there wasn’t really anything to be nervous about and that worrying about it only meant depriving myself of a fantastic experience. Life lesson?)