Today is my eighteenth birthday.
Yet my feelings about today all seem to come from what others have told me. Hearing birthday wishes from so many old friends slowly made me realize that today is supposed to be an important day.
But what’s actually special about today? It seems like just another ordinary day in a busy life. The club made a bit of progress, my GPA fluctuated slightly, the paper got one day closer to its deadline. Looking at it this way, everything is so normal and routine.
But then I think again—yesterday was my last day having an excuse to act like a kid. Today is my first day with no excuse, having to be an adult. That is a bit sad.
So I racked my brain trying to summarize the “life wisdom” from my first eighteen years, but came up empty. And thinking about future life plans feels even more like a pipe dream. Because today is just an ordinary day—I didn’t have some grand epiphany about adulthood.
But today, like every day, is also extraordinary. My birthday, the day before my birthday, every single day—they only happen once.
I always spend today’s time thinking about what I lost yesterday, wasting so much of today’s time in the process.
I really love “One more time, One more chance,” the theme song from Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second. But perhaps I should be looking forward instead?
To my first eighteen years.