on numbers

We think about numbers a lot around these parts.

I was born on the 9th day of the 9th month of the 92nd year of the 1900s. 

My golden birthday was in 2001, a year after the new millennium. I was fresh from my first trip to Nigeria and had terrible constipation from eating too much agege bread. My dad was still in Nigeria with my brother, making sure he got settled before starting his year of boarding school. When we were back in Chicago my mother told me, in no uncertain terms, that money was tight and I wouldn’t really have a birthday that year. Two days later, the Twin Towers blew up (I had asked my mom if my aunt’s lawyer, who worked at the World Trade Center, made it out alive. I don’t remember her answer). 

At 9 I got glasses for the first time and subsequently lost them. This was the age I was a temporary only child, the age my mom spent days in bed with the blinds drawn, dealing with crippling and chronic leg pain, the age George Bush lied about WMDs, the age I celebrated a palindrome new year, and the age Left Eye died. There was nothing golden about turning 9. But I tend to think that ages ending with “9” are fat with learning. Completing the cycle, if you will. I turned 29 last month. 

28 was an unusually intense year. I adopted a cat with severe anxiety. I was hit by a car. Both my parents caught COVID. I was involved in two brief but intense romantic affairs. All within this odd nightmare of pandemic uncertainty, though it’s not as scary as it was last year. It’s no wonder that I’ve read fewer books and submitted nothing for publication this year. And made an unintended three month hiatus with this blog. I lived. Maybe too much. 

I’m still processing the after effects of being a grown up. 2022 is the advent of my new decade. It’s believed that repeating numbers are angel numbers; 222s are seraphs whispering in our ears, telling us that we’re exactly where we need to be. Shit. Here’s hoping.