Ericka Henriquez
I feel like it’s rare to actually feel a year older on the day of your birthday. I always feel my age, that year older, on the day before my birthday. At 12 a.m. on Nov. 24, when my last day of being 18 began, I was sitting on the Northeast Regional Rail Acela #65 on my way back from the Yale-Harvard game.
It was a good day. I got to eat my mom’s homemade Korean food. I slept in my warm childhood bed. I went to the hair salon and got my bangs professionally cut! It was a day of healing, a simple, normal, homey day. As the sentimental person that I am, I kept repeating to myself the fact that it was the last, trying to ignore that pit in my stomach, the feeling of getting older. I love being a teenage girl… what do you mean when I’m 19, I’ll have less than a year of being a teenager??
At 11:50 p.m. as I went through and remembered a moment from all 13 months of being 18, from November 2023 to November 2024, I let myself linger in each month’s memories. From being holed up in my basement all throughout winter break in December writing college application essays to the countless after-school Chestnut Hill Starbucks runs with my best friends in the spring to prom in May to going to Korea over the summer to my FDOC at Yale in August… and so on and so forth. All of the challenges I overcame and the emotions I felt as an 18 year old washed over me as I watched the clock read 12 a.m. on Nov. 25 and thus I said goodbye to my first year of adulthood and said hello to my nasty 19th.
I immediately put my phone on do-not-disturb and went to bed. I was not looking forward to this day in the slightest. Not feeling like I had enough close friends at college to celebrate with and knowing that all of my friends from home were still at school — I expected it to be a lonely day. But I woke up with many happy birthday messages from so many people I love and some people I hadn’t heard from in a while. There were people I knew for certain I would not be getting a happy birthday text from, but nevertheless I couldn’t help but get my hopes up… only to be proven right, to know that some people have either forgotten or don’t care. I have never been the person who has been posted countlessly on Instagram for their birthday, and while that never really bothered me before I couldn’t help but feel a teeny bit butthurt and a little shallow for feeling hurt in the first place. So it kind of was a nasty birthday in some ways.
But there are more important, more happy, things to think about on a birthday: my family. We celebrated with my brother, busy with college, the day before, and it was so nice to see my whole family. My mom cooked miyeok-guk, seaweed soup, a traditional Korean birthday meal. While I may or may not have been viscerally upset that someone in particular forgot my birthday, we ate it together for dinner with some kimchi, in our comfortable kitchen, and she was right by my side the whole night. When my dad got home the three of us ate snacks as I listened to my parents drop some crazy funny family lore, and I got a good laugh.
A week before my birthday I made my wishlist (half joking, half not):
And, hey, I did in fact get to drive my beloved car — it’s not just a Kia, it’s also named Kia — relentlessly over break as I listened to Lorde singing “I’m nineteen and I’m on fire” and clearly I even wrote my article!
I think it’s cute to make a wish for blowing out the birthday cake candles. I remember exactly what I wished for last year on my 18th birthday — neither of the things I wished for came true but it’s funny to look back on and laugh at how stupid it was yet how badly I wanted it. When I blew out my candles this year on my Tous les Jours cloud cake — the best cake — I made my wish, and I really hope this one counts. And no, I didn’t make my wish on anything on the wishlist.
I don’t know what 19 means to me yet, but I know I’ll feel it next November.