As the fog climbed up the shower’s glass door, I thought of an adventure I had. On our first date, we left Vegas at sunset. Her shirt was red and polka-dotted and she smelled strongly of her sandalwood hand lotion. The moon just hung around us throughout the drive, and I sometimes think that it would have been better to pull over the car right away rather than wait to kiss her when we parked at the movie theater in L.A. But the memory’s a pleasant one after all this time, so there’s no sense in ‘if onlys.’ We made it in time for the previews, and after the movie we ate at a Lebanese restaurant at two in the morning. I have not since eaten at a Lebanese restaurant at two in the morning. On the drive back, she fell asleep on my arm, not just holding my hand but hugging it. How could I possibly move it away, safety hazards notwithstanding? I think that’s when my hand became conditioned to always, always hold a significant other’s when in a car. I was nodding off, changing songs on the iPod, feeding myself Starbursts and taking sips of soda, all one-handed. The symmetry may seem phony, but I dropped her off at her car back in Vegas at sunrise. Though the air beyond the bathroom has been lacking in adventure, nothing is empty here.
I have an open invitation for writing prompts from readers. Whenever I’ve completed word count goals for book number two (now at 84,500 words and almost done!), I’ll sort through them and hopefully entertain you lovely people.
Today, in celebration of a reader’s birthday, and because the creative juices are fairly weak and mild-tasting (think unsweetened white tea) I bring you the non-fictional account of how I didn’t have a twentieth birthday.
I know how this sounds from a logical, semantic perspective. It’s like skipping the number thirteen on the button panel of elevators. Call it whatever you like, if you want a fourteenth floor, you have to make your way past twelve and into the bold territory of thirteen.
I turned twenty, yes. I was nineteen one day, then twenty the next. That part is irrefutable. But on paper, in all legal, bureaucratic, official respects, I did not have a twentieth birthday.
Let me explain. I have dual citizenship in Mexico and Israel. The summer of my twentieth birthday, I flew to Israel, where, upon my arrival, I was checked in with my Israeli passport. Due to a clerical error, quite literally a slip of the finger or a misheard consonant, my birthday, according to my Israeli passport, and thus, the State of Israel, is July 30.
My actual birthday is June 30. But as a former classmate liked to quote repeatedly (I don’t know what the source is), “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.” While I’m in Israel, I can only prove that my birthday is on the 30th of July. So, because I was in Israel on June 30th of my twentieth year alive, it was not yet, officially my birthday. For all legal intents and purposes, I was nineteen.
The next day I flew out of Israel, arriving to JFK airport (where I was uninterestingly detained for a few hours for further bureaucratic mix ups not related to when I was born) on the 1st of July, a day after my birthday. I checked in with my Mexican passport, which states my birthday truthfully as June 30th, as a twenty year-old, robbed of his twentieth birthday.
