the birthday project: feeling fine, twenty nine.

On June 24th, 2009, I turned 29. My friend Freya had informed me that your 29th birthday was actually one of the most important birthdays of your life, because it represented the Return of Saturn, the end of your first 30 year cycle. She told me that whatever was going on around your 29th birthday would dictate what your life would be like for the next thirty years. I love that kind of gravitas--makes me feel more alive.

A few weeks earlier, I'd made the move I should've made years before, from my sweet little apartment on First Avenue in Ottawa to my sweet little apartment on Charles Street in Kingston. Leaving Ottawa made me feel like the lights had been turned back on in a room that had been dark for too long. I was falling in love with Kingston, and falling further in love with someone else in the process.

The weekend of my birthday, I drove back home to Hamilton to have dinner with my parents. Our usual quiet cocktail-hour celebration evolved into a wicked party with a generous handful of my best people. There is no greater feeling than watching a car filled with your closest friends drive up to your house, then helping them move a sleeping bag from the back seat only to discover your furthest-away friend hidden underneath it. We ate spring rolls and drank champagne and smoked covertly and rocked the hell out till my mother came back outside to tell me to stop singing Midnight Train To Georgia for Christ's sake, the neighbours were trying to sleep. The next morning I drove back up to Kingston feeling like the luckiest girl in the world.

On the morning of my actual birthday, my friend Jacoba and I went for a run. Kingston is a great running town, sloping streets and old houses and a waterfront trail that passes by Martello towers and street people and helicopter landing pads. We ended our jaunt at Pan Chancho and ate pastries instead of a proper breakfast, because their power had been out all night and their ovens weren't working yet. I went off to work, where I hadn't told anyone it was my birthday, because I didn't know any of them very well yet and I really hate being the centre of attention. I felt like I was keeping a really, really good secret.