11/11/12
Three years is so little, just a teensy dusting of time. Photos of you three years ago are barely discernable from photos from today, maybe with the exception of a haircut or a tiny bit of weight. Ten years, now that’s more like it. Ten years are nice and square, and have corners that stack up neatly against the corners of other decades. Ten years ago, I became friends with my college roommate. Twenty years ago, I stormed out of Lori Pascuzzi’s birthday party: my first-ever public diva moment. Twenty-five years ago, Cassie and I were still taking baths in the kitchen’s double sink. We have photos of ourselves, skinny and soapy and grinning dementedly under Dr. Seuss hair. Twenty-five years feels like a real length of time, for sure. Not like three years, which feels like not much. Just enough time for a quick intake of breath.
My job is the same as it was three years ago, but the following are not: residence, church, marital status. I have my own car, and it isn’t a minivan (fist pump), and a lot of my weekends are spent playing football, and I cook now, and I can say “sandwich” and “coffee” in Korean (ssandtwitch, cop-pee). All because I met a guy. Three years ago.
Even though you've seen it happen to other people, you don't expect it to happen like that to you. The weeks and months spin by, one go around the revolving door and you’re completely disoriented. My twenties have been so piggledy-wiggledy, like the decade version of freshman year, the whole transition of getting used to filling a role you’d only ever seen other people do, figuring out which friends are going to stick around and discovering that you might be the one who ends up ditching them for a different crowd. Take just a fraction of that insanity, throw a new husband into the mix, and you have the feeling that never again will three years be as significant as the last. Unless, of course, you get knocked up or fired. Then you start again.