26
26 is an odd number.
It's technically even but it's odd in the sense that it isn't special at all. That way it is probably not peculiar at all since there are more non-special things than there are special. If it was the inverse then the concept of being special would cease to make sense.
26 here doesn't discretely come right after 25 as if it just appears one day, although it does seem that way. On the contrary, 25 was slowly and continuously flowing into the next. It's not unprecedented though. There have been a lot of 25s that became 26s before. So much in abundance that people attach meaning to the general concept of being a 26.
This 26, despite looking like a lot of 26s, is mine though. Irrevocably mine. For a little while, all I can possibly see is 26.
The number 26 itself has nothing going for itself. It's mostly inert, harmless (I hope), unitless (almost!), and mouldable. It can lie on different figures like circles, lines, or road signs. This particular 26 that we are all now familiar with lies on a specific line segment. At least it looks like a line segment from one perspective, it might be a finite non-connecting curve. It has a known specific start point and an unknown end point.
It's unique.
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I wonder if 18 would look at 26 and think it's in anyway better.
When you're 18 you think there are 6 things that you need to do. Things that will make you happy. Things that will make you someone you're proud of. Over the succeeding numbers, you will probably lose a couple of things and you will add a couple of things and then they will become your things. Things that will bring value to you. Things that are supposed to bring value to you.
They are old things though, standing on rickety foundations of juvenile energy. A lot of energy that doesn't understand or hasn't figured out what its body wants.
But looking ahead is not entirely possible for 18, so 26 gets to take a call on what 18 feels about itself (what a toxic relationship).
Looking back itself isn't the beacon of clarity and wisdom as 18 thought it would be. The figuring out of value consumes as much as it potentially produces.
Looking back from the surface of 26, entire numbers are crudely captured in blurred learnings and misplaced relations. Events fumbled and conjoined with emotions to such an extent that 26 has no way to prove the reality of them. It's awfully blurred behind a one-way moving plexiglass that stops 26 from going backwards or do anything even, except close its eyes and see there.
So all it ends up seeing are these checkpoints that anchor how the distance from one point to another on this rocky finite non-connecting curve can be perceived.
When a new friend, a 23 from another non-connecting curve, asks 26 about 18, 26 unabashedly embellishes and misremembers 18 and presents all this growth. Not to deceive or manipulate but the checkpoints are all that can be seen by 26. And when you can't see something clearly, you start making up things that you believe or hope are true. These checkpoints should have some meaning. Or even better a connection to the next similarly coloured checkpoint.
What 26 doesn't realize, while sitting with a 23 from another non-connecting curve, is that a lot of times you just do things and then the day ends. It's nice to have nice things, you know? But it's a day either way. It's a day well spent. Or well, a day spent at least.
I hope this day 26 has with this 23 from another non-connecting curve is worthy of a checkpoint. Because at the most that's all I can hope for. For 26's sake. And maybe even for 23's. Because even though these checkpoints will eventually look blurry and distant behind plexiglass, they are there. In all their local glory.
And eventually when 26 and 23 morph into 31 and 29 (the delta is not a whole number), and the curves are distant from each other, so distant that it doesn't make sense for the curves to intersect again. At least 31 and 29 will have this mutual checkpoint.
Right now, my 26 has some time to be a lot of things. To define itself any way it wants. And be selectively misremembered by any number that succeeds it. Or any other non-connecting curve that happens to be with it.
At the end of the day, I guess 26 is just a lot of words, with thin metaphors and self-indulgent posturing. So pretty much just like the other 25 before it.
Happy birthday to me I guess.
ps. today is not my birthday
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