Into the Velvet

Sixty-Three Days Until

On the day which marked the beginning of the end of my life, I had been sixty-three days away from my birthday.

This was a big deal. At the start of the calendar year, I'd marked out the date of my birthday on my new school planner. Of course, I'd had birthdays before. Seventeen of them, in fact. And like everyone else on the planet, my birthdays were an exciting addition to each new year as it rolled over. The citizens of the world were each granted one day to be special.

But this was something more.

This birthday was the only one that mattered. More than any other day in the year. Eclipsing everything of significance. The truth of it sunk into my skin. Weighing me down.

It was the day that I would start living.

I'd always been the kid who was older for her age — a label stamped over my forehead due to my older brother. Olly had been a handful since the midwife had pulled him out. My mother had discovered with a shock that her baby wasn't crying so much as laughing. I would follow him four years later, with far less flourish.

Naturally, when one child is almost beyond help, the other is exceedingly praised whenever they exhibit good behaviour. My parents had probably hoped to build me up as an example, goading Olly into becoming more manageable. Tampering his wild streak. But such miracles went beyond mortal capabilities. Nobody could make Olly be anything other than himself. 

We were a counterbalancing act, Olly and I. Where Olly was reckless, I was careful. Where he was lazy and irreverent, I was hard-working and serious. Assumptions had been formed. This deeply held belief about my character — that I was level-headed and self-possessed, already a pre-formed adult from the age of four — had shaped me. Becoming my own assumptions about myself. A truth I'd been born with.

Thus, my entire life had felt as though I was wading through the muck of adolescence; enduring this part-adult, part-fledgling Frankenstein phase of hormonal self-absorption with the knowledge that I was different. I was not unique in this. It isn't unusual for a person to believe that they are more real or specially handpicked than those around them. We're all guilty of taking part in this belief. The oldest form of self-delusion known to mankind.

This was why I could bring myself to do what comes later.

My birthday was approaching — and with it came permission to be free from teenagedom. I wholeheartedly believed, the way one believes in gravity or the roundness of Earth, that turning eighteen would herald the coming of my true self. It would make me a true adult. As the clock ticked over to that midnight stroke, I would experience a metamorphosis. Granted permission to become what I'd always known myself to be — a sophisticated soul. Wiser than all my years.

As an adult, I would finally be so much more. 

Or so I'd thought.

The thirteenth of December would fall on a Friday. My finish line towards adulthood would be on the creepiest day in December, before the Christmas period. I liked to discuss birthdays with anyone who would listen. This exclusively meant Amos.

I was in the middle of a monologue about mortality, wildly gesticulating with my hands. Amos was used to me looking like a crazy person.

"The Great Human Race is something we're all taking part in — it's the race of the Earth as it makes laps around the Sun. That's the human condition, right there! To run against time itself."

"Very poetic." His tone was dry and unimpressed. "Fun fact: did you know you share your birthday with Taylor Swift?"

The room was still dim and quiet. Students milled back and forth around us through the Perspex glass, dragging their feet towards fifth period. Seat placement was sacred here. Amos and I were always early.