Just a Number

I really should not be telling you this but the first number in my combination lock for the locker where I sometimes store my violin is 28. I say 28 and not twenty-eight because it is strictly a number in this case and not a word. It no more points to something else than does an asterisk in a suggested password. In order to remember it, however, I have assigned it a glimmer of significance in the form of a mnemonic device designed to save me from having to look it up on my phone. 

At least, I think it’s still on my phone. If it is, it would be in one of the very first notes I ever saved. So rather than scroll through one-point-five decades of grocery lists and favorite quotes, I stand in front of my locker every December and perform the same ritual, left hand cradling the padlock, right hand summoning the mnemonic device from the soft, squishy recesses of my brain. An image gradually emerges over the course of about three seconds, and I catch a fleeting glimpse of the twenty-eight-year-old self my twenty-three-year-old self projected. 

You see, when I was twenty-three I moved to Virginia to join the Richmond Symphony. It was December of 2009, but don’t worry; I’ll do the math for you later. My first “concert” was the annual Nutcracker run with the Richmond Ballet, during which it is common to leave one’s instrument at the hall overnight and between double performances. I was assigned a locker and given my combination on a sticky note. The second and third numbers were quite catchy (I wish I could tell you but I’ve said too much already), but I needed to invent something in order to remember the first one. Not knowing I would one day be broadcasting this information worldwide, I went with the first association that popped into my twenty-three-year-old brain: me, as a twenty-eight-year-old woman. And because a mnemonic device’s efficacy depends not so much on its logic or defensibility but on how vividly one imagines it, I went ahead and made that a sexy and sophisticated twenty-eight-year-old woman. 

At that time, she was five years away. At the time of this writing, she is more than twice as far away, but in the opposite direction. She came to be and now she is not, and then some. Of course, she never came to be quite in the way I imagined her, so she still exists somewhere in the future of my past. I know this because I still see her briefly every December when my hand is hovering over the lock before I dutifully replace her with a more historically-informed image. It is a strange mental process, but it beats having to look it up on my phone, I guess. 

Replacing the idealized image of my twenty-eight-year-old self with the historically-informed one is always bittersweet. It’s not that historically accurate twenty-eight-year-old me was not sufficiently sexy or sophisticated, I don’t think, and it’s not that I had dreams and goals which have since been dashed upon the rocks of cold, hard reality. It’s not even that she didn’t measure up to my expectations of success, accomplishment, or badassery. (In fact, I hadn’t the slightest intention of becoming the badass that was my twenty-eight-year-old self.) It’s just that Future Me was cardboard, and Real Me turned out to be three-dimensional, sentient, and in flux. I find this vaguely disappointing. 

This yearly ritual—recall, remember, replace—produces a curious sort of whiplash. The polite phrase to use in such situations is “man, time flies”, but a more apt description of my experience would be that it feels as though someone floored it when I was twenty-three years old and hasn’t let up since, and I am pinned to the backseat by G-force, my eyes free to flit about the inside of the car and out the window at pastured cows as helpless as I am. Although my fortieth birthday is just around the corner (you’re welcome), I know we aren’t even going to slow down for the curve. Whether I choose to mark the milestone or ignore it, it will inevitably become part of the blurred scenery of my past, thanks to whomever is so heartlessly stomping on the gas, even as we speak. 

(I feel like everyone who is reading this is either cringing at how old I am, smiling at how young I am, or timidly reaching across the backseat to hold hands with me.) 

But take heart! I have encapsulated my experience and transmuted it into written language so that it will live on for as long as I am here to pay the annual fees. 

Historically accurate version