Twenty Three

He told me once he didn’t miss people. I thought that was romantic, and spent most of my twenty third year trying to be the kind of person he might miss. Everything was elastic, like time when we were together or simply the way he would engage with me, keeping me at arm’s length one minute and drawing me in close when it suited him. I was the best rubber band there was. I stretched out and I snapped back immediately.

I remember sitting in my car after the pub one night, the sky not just inky but jet black, and all we did was talk but it wasn’t really about what we said but how we said it. It didn’t matter that I was in my first adult relationship with someone much older than me, or that he was friends with a boy I once dated.

Months later we found ourselves underneath the same jet black sky but this time driving in a van at midnight. Everyone else was asleep or drifting into another world with headphones in, and we sat at the front with a seat between us, locking fingers and gazes, whilst the white lines and cats eyes flickered on either side of us. We never spoke of that evening again.

Something about twenty three.

I was twenty three when I was in a band and twenty three when I started working in a surf shop in London and twenty three when I was introduced to a town called Falmouth. I was twenty three when I met the next person who wouldn’t miss me and thirty three when I figured that last part out.

Years later I was no longer twenty three but I walk into a place that felt like mine as soon as I stepped inside, and it took me less than twenty three hours to say yes and three days before my 27th birthday I moved into flat number 23.

I could possibly make up some other instances where 23 showed up unexpectedly, like the number of times I’ve roasted a chicken in here this year or how many days I went without fixing the bathroom light (in truth it was longer). Honestly, twenty three only struck me as significant when I arrived in Penzance earlier this summer to a different number twenty three. I spent far more than twenty three days there, but it felt more than coincidental that both of these spaces were marked by this number, and addresses that begin with Saint.

In the other twenty three I nestled in and found myself returning, deeper and more consistently. When I closed the door of number twenty three I felt ten times lighter and when I opened the door of the other number twenty three I smelt jasmine. The first things to pass my lips after being away for so long (apart from three half pints down the road) were crispy spring rolls and hot, salty pho from the only Vietnamese restaurant I order from. Twenty three felt different - a little lighter, too. More sparse and full of new life. Sort of like a new beginning or a fresh start, like it knows that a change is coming.

This morning my bedroom smells like coffee and palo santo. I ate the last two cha gio in bed, and thought about the next twenty three days. I won’t be here, and I wonder if the place I’m staying in next will be marked by that number and what that really means.