How Old Is She? Depends Who You Ask.

The decade-long saga of pretending to be 29 — and finally being it.

It’s summertime in Rapa Nui, which means the sun sets at ten and the air tastes faintly like salt and ripe fruit. Watermelon fields, tomato vines, a horizon that refuses to dim—everything hums with that slow, golden feeling of summer. I’ve been chasing this season for nearly four years now, stringing together summers like beads across a bracelet: summer here on the island, then summer again in the US.

What surprised me was not how good summer feels, but how it quietly repaired a part of my life I had written off: my birthday.

My birthday used to fall on the darkest, shortest, most exasperating day of the year. A 3:30 p.m. sunset. A childhood filled with “sorry, we’re away for winter break!” A party that could never quite gather enough people to become one. And layered under all of that: the sense that my immediate family and I lived slightly out of tune with one another —still to this day, I’am endlessly misunderstood—like instruments that had never been calibrated to play in the same key.

So I did what many adults do when something becomes too heavy to hold: I ignored it. From eighteen onward, my birthday became a strange little paradox of a day. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut and let it blur past as fast as possible—and at the very same time, I wanted it to stretch out endlessly, to finally feel like the day that was supposed to be mine. A day of conflict, really: wanting to disappear from it while also wanting it to care about me.