Being the Baby
Bored at work, I took an online mental age test I found on Twitter and it told me I was 52. I know that’s just internet B.S., but I couldn’t help resonating with that number. I often tell people that I feel like I’ve lived multiple lives, and that’s why I’m so tired all the time. In reality it’s just a more poetic way of addressing the symptoms of depression, but it sounds a lot better and more elusive (I’m an Aquarius, we love being mysteries).
At the same time that I’m hypothetically 52 and experienced at everything, I am also 10 years old and I know nothing at all. I think this is what it means to be in your twenties.
We are born into the world kicking and screaming. Poets love to obsess about that, myself included. We are angry and sure that one of the greatest tragedies of human life is being born, no matter how cute the baby. The baby, after all, is but another body that will morbidly decay, stripped of tenderness as it goes on living.
In James Baldwin seminal LGBTQ+ novel Giovanni’s Room, the narrator, David, refers to his lovers, Giovanni, as his baby as he swoons:
““And then: ‘Here comes your baby. Sois sage. Sois chic.’ He moved slightly away and began talking to the boy next to him. And here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his…
