It’s 12:57 am on Friday, March 8, 2024, and I’m sitting in bed. My partner is snoozing softly next to me. Our old cat is snore-purring at the foot of the bed. The stoic face of Keanu Reeves as Neo in The Matrix is on the TV screen. He’s just learned Kung Fu.

Ordinarily, I don’t allow my computer in the bedroom. But it’s my birthday and my regular garden variety insomnia has been replaced with this very festive birthday insomnia. It’s like I’m excited because I know exactly how old I am.

And yeah. That’s not the least true thing I’ve heard today… 

I often forget how old I am. It’s not a new thing. I’ve always had a flexible grasp of my age. For the longest time if someone asked me how old I was my first impulse was to say 27. 

It started before I turned 27 and lasted long into my 30s. It lasted until I turned 37. Suddenly at 37 I again knew what age I was. And I continued to know my age for an entire year before I just kind of thought I was 37 for a decade.

Today I’m 47. And I suspect I’m going to be able to remember how old I am for an entire year…  What comes after that? Could be 48. More than likely it’s 9 years of forgetting how old I am before I pull it together for 57.  

It’s a pattern. One which I may have been a bit slow to notice, but that’s no surprise. At 47 I’m learning things about myself that, frankly, I probably should have known when I was 7.  But we all mature at our own pace, right?

Perhaps it’s because I was born in the year 1977. That’s right 1977 brought you Star Wars AND Cami Kaos. Not bad. Not bad at all. 

It could be that 7 years is the amount of time it takes my brain to process something as monumental as having spent another decade on this planet. So I freak out about it for 7 years and then I just settle into it to enjoy the next 10 years of being whatevery-seven. 

Maybe 7 is my magic number.