The girl who turned thirty was 6 days into her next big adventure. She’d been laid off from the comfortable place she’d been perched just 6 weeks before. She’d called a friend for lunch who had canceled the morning of and she’d never heard from her again.

She was terrified and hopeful and praying it exceeded her expectations. It didn’t, but she grew.

She published her third collection of poetry – her favorite title yet. She sat under a total solar eclipse – watching for hours as the sun disappeared and the sky darkened, until night overtook the world for a small wondrous period of midafternoon. What a rare thing.

She was less than two months away from the proposal she’d dreamed of for 3 years – just 2 days shy of her trip to Italy, the one she dreamed of for 7 years. She got off the train station at Lake Garda this time, and spent 2 days encased in its cobble stone streets, the shadow of the castle, the cry of the swallows that circled its tower at twilight. She went back to Venice, and this time she walked every bridge and narrow alleyway. She bought her mom Murano glass from the island this time, and she ventured north into the Dolomites – into its aqua lakes and its craggy peaks and the vicious winds that promised an auspicious Winter Olympics. Into its frozen lakes and the borders of Austria with its cuckoo clocks and movie-set houses. She got her spring road trip though Tuscany – walled cities and weeping cottonwoods, and chartreuse hills. The most pillowy gnocchi, creamy truffle, and moist salami. She did made it to the Saturnia hot springs and she floated in its salt pools until she burned her forehead. Rome brought her rain but she likes seeing old friends anyway.

She finally got the tattoo to commemorate Clipped Wings. Bigger than she expected, more painful than she remembered, she’d faint in an emergency vet later that night. And then there was becoming a sailor. A compulsion, if not an absolutely inadvisable one. Someone who might get sea sick on flat ground in the wrong circumstances, doing 24 hours of practical instruction in the middle of June. Nowhere to hide under the +100° sun. She did it though, after advocating for a week off to recover from sun stroke that seemed impossible to avoid on the unobstructed white of a 22 foot deck. She made good use of the dock bumpers and she keeled hard into the wind and she found her groove. And now she’s a certified sailor.

She spent late summer in New York, under the more gently closed fist in which hydrangeas can thrive. She finally went to Serendipity and had the frozen hot chocolate, she walked Manhattan streets until the pavement pounded her ankle into submission.

And when August came, it was time to plan the wedding she didn’t know would balloon into something more wonderful and wicked than she originally knew. Blossoming into something beautiful but only under the threatening cries to sip once more from her life-force. She invited a friend down, one that she thought might be too busy, one that she thought might not feel the same compulsion she did that afternoon. But she wasn’t, and she did, and she was there when she picked out her wedding gown.

She went to New Orleans for the first time to meet the people she embarked on her new adventure with, tip toeing around the space and rushing through the days in an effort to not be noticed or left behind, somehow. She paid too much money for a sterling silver cicada ring and it didn’t matter as the horns of Frenchman Street blew.

But it was October that brought her best adventures yet. She trekked to Iceland, arriving on a morning where the sun wouldn’t rise until close to 9 am and there was nothing to keep the frost at bay. But the lava fields emerged as she neared Reykjavik. She’d finally snorkel between continental plates, in glacier water that straddled the freezing line, in the cathedral of rocks that once marked where Europe and Asia met, in the most vast and beautiful national park she’d ever seen. She anxiously agreed to a 6 hour roadtrip, driven in one day, to the Snaefellsnes Peninsula and back. The most beautiful vistas she might ever seen, lined with moss covered volcanos and little horses, and thin, towering waterfalls, and sweeping yellow grasses and black beaches. She’d wait every night until her eyes drooped, an aurora forecast in her hand and she prayed to god – I just need to see it once, just for a moment. And she did. For 2 minutes at most, and that was enough.

And when October gave way to November, she was in the Rocky Mountains once again. Snow flurries blowing and ice coating the pumpkins that still marked where Halloween had been, just a moment ago. There had been trick or treaters in the streets, bundled against an indecisive wind – one that allowed the yellow leaves to cling for just a moment longer but made no pretenses that that would last. There she bought all the silver rings she could carry, she covered every mountain pass they could, she hiked 3 miles on a deserted trail so picturesque she might actually believe this is all simulated.

But the fall was not without its steep costs. The heat lorded over like a mob boss for longer than us ransom payers were promised. And under its lordship, she sat in the dark against its relentlessness, working for hours to keep the ship righted. She no longer had the time for weekend hobbies. The very effort of staying cool and staying rested absorbed any energy she used to have for things that made life worth living. And for 6 months, everyday was only an effort to get to December, when the tension might break and she might finally, finally, drop from her watch.

She closed it, those final days of the year, making good on one last promise in her favorite place in the world. One more writing retreat to get the book she’d spent 11 years fostering with neglectful, idle hands to a place where it might be ready to claim its own space in the world. And she would. That book was completed by a 30 year old, the one that was started by a 19 year old.

Beautiful, stupid, remarkable, untenable was the year of the girl who turned 30. Dreams upon dreams that crashed at her feet, and rare, once-in-a-lifetime moments that gathered at her doorstep, and all of the blank space around them crowded with ledgers and costs. Moments that had her bowing to the ground executioner style until she finally understood that she couldn’t live that way, that she couldn’t pass days that weren’t worth passing. And she would until she realized that the world would demand everything she seemed willing to give, that it would offer anything it thought she might take.

And she trudged out of that year with closed fists in her pocket. In the scant two months until she’d turn her watch to the girl who turned 31, she lived differently. She was brought to her brink by the crying squirming thing that would eventually become a facsimile of a beautiful wedding, but she asked for help and she received it. She would start to send queries of this book to the people who might foster it in its new form. She went to Costa Rica to celebrate her bachelorette, with the two people who came with her to pick a gown. She saw baby sloths, and waterfalls that silhouetted volcanos, toucans and red eyed tree frogs and poison dart frogs. Nights in the tropical rainforest, and hot springs moody and lush. Secluded little lakes, and mornings punctuated by a cacophony of bird song. One of the most beautiful trips she might ever take in her life.

She was honest, even if sometimes it was the last and final thing she tried. She was brave, even if only after being pummeled for long enough that she took notice of the option. She experienced wonder on a scale that maybe no girl who ever held her watch had. And she did things they always meant to do. She left this morning, never to be seen again. Resting, finally, after a year that trialed her to her very end. And what she passed to the girl that turned 31 was this feeling of absolute certainty in herself. She has the space and time to make choices that feel right, even if they take a long time to feel right. She is valuable enough to decline the demands of the world without the fear of defaulting. There is no version of living this life where she cannot live it honestly.

The girl who turned 31 is getting married in less than a month. She’s going to Key West to snorkel shipwrecks. She’s returning to Maine to see Jack’s Mannequin one more time. She doesn’t even know yet what will unfold and what will fill the blank space around it. But she owes a debt of gratitude to the girl who held watch before her, and made the entire ordeal of being alive so much worth doing.