They say you pass through this life but once. And among life’s greatest paradoxes is, as your grandparents will tell you, wishing at eighty that you’d known at twenty all you know now and not having known at twenty just how much there was you didn’t know. But what if you could live a life within a life? A sort of accelerated life in which you are born and die all within the course of your natural lifetime?
I was born at 11:15 a.m. on May 13th, 1986. On July 27th, twenty years later, I packed my suitcase and left behind the life I knew. On the plane, nine hours passed like nine months, and as though it had been dropped by a stork, the rather large, white bundle otherwise known as a 747 drifted through layers of clouds and landed with a thud on the ground in a strange land. I was struck by the uncanny (yet slightly eerie) resemblance that the journey through the airport sleeve bore to the passage I’d made twenty years earlier as I exited my mother’s womb. I emerged exhausted, cold, frightened. The fluorescent lights left me momentarily blinded, and I felt so lost and vulnerable that I might as well have been lying naked upon an obstetrician’s table.
My legs wobbled like a toddler’s as I passed through customs, but over the course of a half an hour or so, I gradually re-mastered the art of walking. I spent the next couple of weeks learning effective methods of asking for help, ordering food and fulfilling other basic needs. I even completed a course in public restroom smarts, which I will refer to, for the sake of comparison as well as humor, as “potty training.” That is, I learned to locate restrooms without attendants so as to avoid paying, how to strategically hang my coat to keep shut doors without locks and to always carry tissues and hand sanitizer, since many bathrooms don’t have toilet paper or soap. The first month was filled with trying new foods, some of which made me sick, taking long naps in the middle of the day and crying at night. Finally, the linguist in me could fill a hundred pages on the topic of language acquisition, but suffice it to say, I learned, as a child does, the words I needed to function and found myself constantly surrounded by people correcting my grammar.
I entered next into the “school age,” where I started classes and learned how to handle myself in a new academic setting. Although I still clung to whatever mother figures I could find, I began to go out more on my own and make friends at school. I also started to learn “bad words!” After that, I plunged dramatically into a teenage funk that was dominated by rebellion, the search for identity and belonging, long hours on the phone, a boatload of angst and an overall emotional rollercoaster. It culminated in domestic warfare and me moving out.
I feel recently as though I’ve made it to age twenty. That means being independent, having a little confidence; it means college, essays and exams. It means dating. It means living with other “twenty-somethings” and finding a community of people my own age. But most importantly, it means I can finally be me. I am no longer younger than I was before I boarded the plane for Uruguay. It means that my accelerated life has caught up with my natural life and I am now in a position to grow and move forward. It’s a fascinating opportunity, because next July, when this life draws to a close, I will return to my natural life only one year older but with all the experiences and wisdom of a small lifetime.
