(Daily Prompt: Age Old Question) 

 

Since the banishment of the Penny we round up in Canada. I pay a little more for things but my pockets are quieter and my purchases bear more symmetry. There is a cost to settling trivial debts that far exceeds the payment. Drop three pennies and you become a pauper or a scoff law in the eyes of the public, the middle ground lost in a moments clumsiness. It is better to be even.

I turned Thirty Eight last week. A not young age of no particular significance.I look less so, to the extent that people argue the number. My appearance fueling a bizarre debate that I cannot be this awful thing. It is odd to defend a compliment by asserting a condition. I’ve stopped clarifying and adopted “essentially forty” as a stock answer. It feels true and communicates something of a state. I’ve earned my old and the lesser assumption, while generous, feels reductive.

I have no desire to be less, to pretend my adulthood came easier and more cheaply than it did. There is nothing precocious about my maturity, I’ve learned slowly and painfully and with a cost often borne by the women in my life. The person that I’ve become is a product of the distance that I’ve traveled and those walking beside me, to round down either is to diminish both. It is better to be even.