Two weeks before my thirty-ninth birthday, I start reading the obituaries. Rather, I consume them. I sob audibly in public, mouth full of al pastor, the stories of the deceased, and the subtle flavor of loneliness that always haunts me these days. Engineers and mothers, veterans and professors, grandfathers and dancers. They lived their lives, which, through the lens of grief and gratitude, are all filled with unique shades of magnificence and now they are gone.

I sob because the obituaries are just what I needed. Not death itself. But the swirling stretch of life that preceded it. The clarity with which we view what has already happened. The way even the most tragic of events end up having their place in the puzzle of things. When we stand back, the mosaic of life— all the shattered but colorful little bits we cobble together— seems beautiful.

Life is beautiful.

The last time I remember feeling this retrospective clarity so deeply must have been ten years earlier. In my imagination, I will pretend this experience, too, was at the doorstep of my birthday. Perhaps as I approach the last year of each decade of my life, I am met with a moment of reckoning that insists I look back in awe.

In this memory, I am standing on 27th Street in San Francisco outside the house where I live in a basement in-law in a senior couple's home. Rita, my landlord, is witty, attentive, thoughtful, and kind, but not overly so. She occasionally leaves a bundle of alstroemeria from the backyard or some leftover soup on my doorstep but also intermittently, the slightly aggressive note about my indoor plant which might leave a stain on her carpet. I frequently straddle the line between feeling awe and annoyance in regards to her.

Today she is her warmest self and she meets me outside to share some news with me. She lets me know that she is divorcing her husband, Greg, after some decades together. He has always struck me as a bit bumbling and a poor match for her, but I have long since learned that the mysteries of others' relationships are not for me to judge. He is moving out soon and she will live alone in her castle on the hill.

Something about the way she speaks and the fact that she is choosing to share something so personal with me at all feels deeply significant in a universal sense. As if she is opening a portal into a certain window of life that I have not yet begun to understand. I remember looking out at the fading light of San Francisco, the rolling hills, the way in which the city is both so compact and so full, and feeling the ache of transition. The palpable pause between what was and what lies ahead, and the gravity we feel when we stand witness to what we have chosen for ourselves. The feeling of being suspended in that hallway between two seemingly different realities. I am wistful and raw, an open wound.

If I could look forward to the decade ahead of me, would I do it all again?

Later that year I met Nic.

Recently I was in line at my neighborhood coffee shop when I saw Pliny the Elder sitting in the refrigerated case. After so many years of tumult, I am slowly learning not to be so reactive to every single thing which stirs me internally, but this double IPA somehow feels like a personal attack and brings me to tears before work.

That same decade ago, Pliny was hot on the beer scene and nearly impossible to find. The one Whole Foods in town would receive a delivery once a week on Wednesdays and customers were limited to purchasing a maximum of two for the few fleeting moments they remained on the shelves. Early on in our love, Nic and I managed to get our hands on a duo of Pliny and spent a magical afternoon in Dolores Park intoxicated by this strong beer and the fervor of new love. I can still see my big gold hoops, his beard, the wild parrots, and the repeated image of the universe collecting itself with precision to create this exact moment just for us, now.

This moment stands in direct opposition to that of an obituary. In my memory, our Plinys on a hill are so full of possibility, of anticipation. It is not the memory of what was, but rather the hope of all that might be.

Sometime years later, we tried Pliny again and agreed it had either gotten worse, beer in general had gotten better, or our memory and experience had colored it with a value that wasn't quite there in reality.

Does it matter which one is true?

Tomorrow I am 39. There is something about this moment in time that feels like all of those aches combined. It is both anticipation and remembering. It is an ending and a possibility. It is the understanding that, in fact, everything is always changing. Both the hope of change and the fear of it have proved themselves to be absurd because the one constant is change, itself.

Maybe that's what I learned this year. Whatever claims I make about my life, myself, are pointless because they are constantly changing, as am I. For so long I've clung to certainty; I've made a life raft out of security, a buoy out of knowing, but now, only in burning my life as I knew it to the ground, have I found any certainty at all, and that is, essentially, that I know nothing.

I give up, in the best way.

I'm not afraid of being forty. I'm not afraid of wrinkles. Despite how I live my life and endlessly talk in circles over it all, I am not even afraid of being fat or ugly. I’m not afraid of being poor or alone or wrong or stupid.

I am afraid only of living my life halfway and so sometime recently, I refused to do so any longer.

I started to write what I want, wear what I want, eat and move and love how I want. I started saying no when I meant no, speaking my truth, holding boundaries even when it’s uncomfortable. I stopped asking for permission or approval. It’s been scary and I’ve stumbled a lot, falling back into self doubt and a certain desperation for comfort but continually I reroute myself into alignment.

Life is beautiful. If anything, this is what I know. If we choose to look at it with the clarity of hindsight, we can see how even the messy bits, or often, especially those, add so much beauty to the kaleidoscope of life. It is fractal and ever-changing and tumbling and wild and when I can stand back to just behold it all instead of planning out each moment, it feels like a total fucking miracle.

My mom asked me recently if I wanted to write my own obituary. She has a neighbor friend, who has written her own, now years ago. This woman is poised and beautiful. Her house is a wood-roofed cottage covered in ivy and filled with perfect things. She regularly gifts handmade baked goods and bundles of homegrown sweet peas to her friends and neighbors on every holiday and birthday. Externally she seems every bit immaculate, quaint, enviably together. Naturally she has plans to close her time on earth with equal tidiness and grace as she lived on earth by pre-writing her own obituary.

My swift answer to my mother was no. I will not be writing my own obituary. Despite or maybe because of my deep love of words. I will be sure to close my time with the same recklessness and wild abandon that I have lived my life on earth. I will daily acknowledge the reality that I am becoming, every day, that whatever I think I know surely won't be true another moment from now, that my ability to sum up who I was will be impossible until I become whoever I will be. I will not be caged in, especially not by my perception of myself.

It's all changing.

I longed for a place for so long. I longed for an identity, a title, a partner, a home, a role, a landing spot. I longed to carve out that Beth-shaped crevice in the world, to nestle into it comfortably, to find security in knowing.

I have let that longing go.

What it will say when it's all done, I don't know. I don't know the details. I don't know the facts. I don't know what will become. All I know is that when I'm gone, there's no iota of possibility that it will say: she lived her life halfway.

Instead let it be, whatever the details: She was absolutely, totally, unabashedly alive… until she wasn't.

And then may they scatter me to the wind, so I can live again.