Time, curious time

 23? 23?! 23?!?!

Sorry, what was that?

23.

A ridiculous number of trips around the Sun. Preposterous. Kerflummoxing. If I were in a TV show, I'd let out a string of expletives (billions! of blue! blistering! barnacles!!!), kick back a glass of hmm-what-is-this-new-concoction?, and dramatically slam my hand down on the table in a non-existent bar that's suspiciously joyous and colored in warmth.

I would like to quote Anne of Green Gables, the greatest protagonist of all time, who once said, "To think that this is my twentieth birthday, and that I've left my teens behind me forever". Right. You might ask, "Why, Keerthana, haven't you been twenty for a good... how many is that... three years, now?"

And to that, fellow peruser of the interweb, I will let you in on a secret of life. A discovery, if you will. An earthshattering fact - the rules of time and math and physics can be bent. Before you dismissively scoff at me, think again. The last two years have certainly provided us with ample proof.

Another secret - although this comes as no surprise to those who know me - is that I continue to find myself enamored with all the little things that make up my life. I find peace in making a hot cup of tea early in the morning. I find warmth in the sun that slowly creeps up from behind the trees. I find joy in the faces of dear, old friends who I now see on scheduled video calls. I find familiar, comfortable love in the inside jokes and stories that are shared on a family call.

Yet another secret, a rather tantalizing back-and-forth of sorts, really; what counts as truly living? It's odd. Somehow I'm doing things like taking care of myself whilst trying to moor myself in the maelstrom that is grad school, and then there are times when I throw my hands up in exasperation and decide that yes, I will be eating honey-drenched crunchy oat cereal for dinner. I know that by societal constructs I'm an adult, but that just tells me that the definition of "adult" changes every single day. It's alarming and it's wondrous that I have people in my life who have led wildly different lives to the one I'm leading at 23.

... anyway. I'm not running the Discovery Channel so I believe it's time for me to delicately extract myself from this chaos and bid thee farewell. I might keep you posted, or I might make another over-the-top post five years from now. Time will only tell.

Time, curious time.

(To all the Swifties out there, yep, thank you for checking out my post. Did I shamelessly use the title as click bait? Well. All I have to say is that every moment spent not quoting a Taylor Swift song is another moment being irrelevant. I will not say anything about the fact that as a grad student, I decided to take on a particular reading assignment only because its title was "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things").