Happy birthday to me… well, in two days, anyway.
I’ll be twenty-one. Strange how wrong that feels. I should be turning… thirty, yes, thirty seems just about right. I found a few more grey hairs today, though I don’t bother to pluck them out. In my vanity, I am quite certain that I will even go grey in an attractively debonair fashion.
All I can think about, with the date approaching, is where I stood a year ago.
A year ago, I was alone.
A year ago, I was still barely above poor, living off the remnants of my money from Vavard – and more primarily Marisa’s largesse. I was exulting in the fact that I was actually wearing silk, and that no one would challenge me as to my right to do so.
A year ago I was just on the threshold of… the events that so changed my life. Even here, I dare not elaborate on what they meant to me in detail. But I thought myself a competent, experienced fellow, who had seen much of the worst the world had to offer and could face it all without hesitation. Now I know that I was wrong.
Experience… I am no longer stunned every time I set foot inside the Palazzo Damassande; even the palace does not make me stop and catch my breath. I walk in velvet, sleep in silk, bathe in hot water whenever I desire it. Gold does not astonish, stone does not intimidate. (And it’s been a really long time since I ate out of a garbage midden, which is pretty great too, actually?)
Yet I feel as if my sense of wonder has only been sharpened. I have been rendered down to my component dreams, virtues and vices. Uncertainty burned away with all of them, and I see the world for what it is now, taking nothing for granted.
In this one way I am grateful, because I am stripped of doubt. I know that there are beautiful things in this world worth protecting, worth marvelling at. I know they have nothing to do with silk or stone or silver. I know that I can do anything that is required to protect them, because that is the kind of man that I am, and that makes me appreciate them all the more.
Here’s to a year of changes, simultaneously the best and the worst days I have ever known.
