I wonder if I’ve been ungracious to 31. And yet I have avoided this blank screen. It feels as if all the nice things I could say about that year are covered in a film I don’t want to touch. But that is not scorn for the girl who was 31, it is what can only be described as pity. Shining fruits sitting in her palm that hid their rot until she bit into them.

The girl who was 31 had a beautiful wedding, wore a beautiful gown, danced to Octopus’s Garden with her dad in the botanical garden he took her to as a child. She went on 3 writing retreats, made slow and doubtful progress against her most intimidating novel yet – her most unyielding poetry book to date. She snorkeled shipwrecks – finally! – only to find that she very much does not belong as a ghost in the ocean. She stood upon the sandbar of Key West, and its roosters, and blue waters. She rode a schooner there that she’d later see pull out of the Camden harbor months later.

She saw Jack’s Mannequin with her childhood friend, their opening show of a 20 year reunion in Portland, Maine. She shopped the cobblestone streets and roadtripped to Boothbay Harbor, to Camden, saw the trolls among the azaleas. She’d return months later and solidify that place in her mind as some kind of heaven.

She’d reunite with family she hadn’t seen in just about two decades. Beautiful New Hampshire summer, with cold nights that necessitated crackling bonfires, rolling hills that led to the white mountains. Lilly pads bobbing in the water, same as the steamboats of Portsmouth. She took more chances – the expensive late flight out to Boston on a whim, on some existential idea that it was her last chance. And it was. Showing up the wedding she was only tenuously invited to in the dress that never got to be her birthday dress. Going to the flash events, getting the tattoos. The tattoos! The way she fell in love again with them, and the women who could draw the lining of her soul.

Rain storms, lightning sheathed in clouds. The summer when the crepe myrtles bloomed all month, fluffy and luminescent. A year of film, and finding old friends again. Of finding new friends in familiar shadows. Of foggy mornings and new favorite places.

This year cost her something, robbed her more like. But there wasn’t nothing left. It’s just that Pat died in the end. And Bean almost did too. And Crouton’s pain brought the fear of sleep. And money left just as soon as it came. And travel was about other people, in all the ways it was also beautiful. And the place she’d cried about in 2024, thinking she might come back all her life, brought a foreignness that may just repel her forever. And all of the orchestration for all of the good moments covered in film left very little energy to enjoy the moment when it came. It’s just that 31 didn’t let that girl rest, or find a corner of peace to sink down into. It’s that the boldness yielded too little freedom, that the prices, though worth it, were steep.

The girl that was 31 wouldn’t regret a thing but the fact that she was too seldom honest out loud. And when she finally was, it was like the pain had already calcified in a way that feels irreparable. It’s that you can’t ever get that time back. But she slowed near the end, in search of her peace. Wandering only as far as she had to for a good spot to rest. And I am slow now too, with the feral need to run faster towards something more worthwhile than getting by.

I’ve always liked the number 32, and I hope to like being the girl who is. So I must start by giving the girl who was 31 her flowers, and celebrate the knowledge that she can finally, finally rest.