JULY
By your math, it’s the last month of your twenties, Virgo. Since your birthday is at the end of August, it is perhaps more correct to say that August is the last month of your twenties, but you seem dead set on hanging sentimentality onto July, so far be it for the skies to interfere.
It’s not necessarily that you’re attached to your twenties—a decade famous for being plagued by embarrassing disasters. Your twenties, of course, were far more embattled by humiliation due to all those improv photo shoots (human pyramids) and the fact that you got married (you never imagined you’d get married in your twenties and fear everyone assumes your “early” marriage signifies a staunch religious fundamentalism you do not possess).
Who could mourn a decade so packed with mortification? For example, your exit from a bar to purchase emergency triage tampons was once done so hastily that you left behind a folder full of tax information and highly personal documents. You had crudely scrawled “$ Stuff” on the cover, alerting other patrons to its importance.
Also during your twenties, you were contacted by a doughnut shop that somberly announced you’d somehow left your paycheck in their store post-doughnut purchase. I know all, and yet even I cannot fathom why on earth you were bandying your paychecks about during a doughnut run.
In your twenties you also left all of your possessions in the backseat of a NYC cab that took you from Laguardia to your first sublet in the city. You paid for the cab in cash and refused a receipt, ensuring your first week livin’ in the city was spent callin’ every city precinct to see if anyone had turned in your bag. (Miraculously you got in touch with the cab driver and he drove it back to you! The skies love that man and so do you!)
No no, it’s not a fear of your youthful sun setting. It’s more so that even when change is good or healthy or normal or unstoppable, it still has a tinge of melancholy.
You were recently struck with a memory from age 20. You were at the Cash and Carry wholesale grocery store purchasing snacks for the improv theatre you worked at during college, when you got to the check out and realized you’d lost the theatre’s Cash and Carry card. Clueless as to how to possibly solve this simple problem on your own, you ran to your car (a stick shift you barely understood how to drive, whose previous clutch you had fully burned through due to your misconception that shifting was best done aspirationally—Eventually I’ll be going 50, so lemme just get this bad boy into gear 5 right off the bat) and called your Dad crying. He gave you calming advice about this very low stakes situation, and eventually you regained the strength to go back into Cash and Carry—where they were calling for you over the intercom because they’d found your card. Problem solved!
Even though you remember this event, you don’t have any real memory of ever being so helpless, and have no explicit memory of becoming less helpless, either. But you are! Which is all to say that one day you had your last meltdown in a Cash and Carry parking lot and you didn’t even know it.
It’s not as though these days you are without fault or flaw; and you certainly don’t avoid publicly crying (I would say, actually, that crying in public is your only legacy), there is just a sadness to realizing that a version of you is gone—even if that version had terrible fashion sense and was perpetually prepared to fall in love with someone indifferent to her.
Your growth is perhaps best mapped through the way you approach conflict. You’ve never been one to sit back silently if you don’t agree with something (when your since-cancelled celebrity crush wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, you brought a petition to school for people to commit to only watching movies he was in until the Academy corrected their oversight. He hadn’t been nominated. You were ten.). Your approach, however, has yet to be perfected.
Months ago, you booked a few acupuncture sessions for help with painful cramps. To afford these treatments, you attend a sliding scale acupuncture studio that offers more affordable rates than your preferred place in Chinatown that once reanimated your neck from a gnarled, crooked demise. The affordable acupuncture place treats patients all in one big room, so you don’t really have privacy, but that doesn’t particularly bother you if you’re saving $100.
For the most part, these treatments are done on your stomach, feet and legs, so you attend the appointments dressed with loose clothing that’s easily slid up and down to accommodate the needles. For your third appointment, you had a new practitioner. She complimented your outfit, which is the easiest way to trick you into a false sense of safety. This day, you had a tight sweater that got in the way of the needles meant for your chest. To allow access, you removed your shirt and lay on the table just wearing your pants and bra.
After your complimenting acupuncturist placed all of your needles, she draped a long paper sheet across your whole chest, so as to shroud your breasts from the room. You were surprised that you weren’t asked if the little shame tent was something you wanted, and eavesdropped/spied within an inch of your life to hear if the subsequent patients in the studio were given similar accoutrements.
Two men came in after you and removed their shirts for their respective appointments. Surprise surprise, neither of them were given a paper sack to lay inside. They were permitted to simply exist in their bodies. Both of these men were far more naked than you, since you were wearing a brassiere—an accessory neither of them were sporting.
You spent the hour-long session with boiled blood, carefully workshopping how you’d confront the outfit-praising acupuncturist when she returned to remove your paper sleeping bag and peep your heathen bosom.
You opened with a lie. You told her that you were coming from “a place of love" (100% false, the place was ire), and were merely wondering why you were given a little paper suit to wear over your chest during your appointment.
She gave you many excuses that were observably untrue. She told you that:
She had asked you if you wanted to have a cover and you had said yes (false)
She asks everyone if they want a cover (false, you listened to every syllable uttered at the tables the naked men enjoyed)
As much as she wishes it were, the studio was “actually not a safe space” (????)
This is “still Bushwick” after all (what does that mean!!!!)
If your bra weren’t mesh, she wouldn’t have covered you (????)
You—always prepared to unleash your self-righteousness when your bizarre inner referee whispers This is unjust—carefully pointed out all of the falsehoods in her monologue. That she didn’t offer the shame robe to you, or to the two men who came in after you. You inquired about her implication that Bushwick was unsafe for women (the most unsafe thing about Bushwick for you personally is that there’s a 75% off sale at your favorite vintage shop and it’s incinerated your frontal lobe) and she offered a similarly incomprehensible retort.
You left in a sad fury, wailing when you got home and destroying any progress you’d made in the appointment. Your tears made sense to the skies. After all, if you can’t let your boobs out at a holistic center in Bushwick, where on earth can those little (and I do mean little, you were changing with your best friend a few years back and she said Where did your boobs go? and she was right, where did they go?) puppies exist without judgment? Perhaps even more offensively, how dare she call the delicate lace of your bra “mesh” as though your boobs were dressed to go to a cheesy 80’s party?
You spend the next few months drafting an email to the owner in your head before realizing she (formally referred to in your home as The Sexist) is the owner, and you put the whole event out of your mind.
This month, the cramps return, so you book another appointment. This time, you're determined to not let anything stand in the way of your boobs being observable to all.
You’ll have yet another new practitioner, and when she returns to your table to needle you she finds you without a shirt or bra. You defiantly lay, tits akimbo, awaiting the paper tablecloth to be thrust upon you. No such thrusting occurs. Your practitioner does not share the same Scared Of Boobs perspective as the owner, and treats you like a human being with a human body who’s seeking healing. (She does have a very strong reaction to your description of cramps and sort of pointedly mentions hysterectomies…but that’s neither here nor there.)
Once the needles are placed, revelation hits. She never put any needles in your chest. She didn’t need to access your chest for this appointment at all, and just very politely ignored the wary gaze of your areolas for several minutes as she placed needles in the locations you actually needed them, like your feet, head, and legs.
During your hour-long appointment you’ll reflect on how this is the perfect encapsulation of a woman with one foot in her twenties and one in her thirties. Your twenties are full of the blind defiance that leads a person to remove their clothes before learning that they actually don’t need to remove their clothes. You were so certain that this studio needed to learn from their mistakes that you didn’t even stop to ask if you needed to be centaur-naked in the first place.
Quite unusually, the part of you that’s arriving in your thirties will allow this all to unfold without embarrassment or apology. The you of yesteryear would have tripped all over herself to atone for the mistake of taking her dogs (boobs) for a walk (out) and made fun of herself to no end for her unnecessary bare breasts. You would have followed up with an email to the studio days later, signing off with a joke signature like:
Warmly,
Eager Boobs McGee
Unfortunately, I’m in the position to tell you that your twenties never fully extinguish, Virgo. A small part of them always lives on, creating conflict and destroying whatever they can get their grubby little hands on. Fortunately, your later decades will be there to clean up the mess with an appropriate amount of apology (which in some cases, is none at all, and is almost never profuse).
Aging is addition, Virgo; you get new perspectives—not a memory wipe. Would you ever want to completely lose the part of you that seeks social revenge, boobs-first? And aren’t you happy you eventually learned that romantic love is more fun when requited? This cha cha slide towards death is inevitable, Virgo, so don’t allow your folly to convince you that change is bad-terrifying. It’s undoubtedly terrifying, but from my little beanbag in the stars it’s obvious that it’s actually fun-terrifying—it’s just hard to see when you’re the one slidin’ to the left.
“Aging is addition, Virgo; you get new perspectives—not a memory wipe.” Best line ever! I can guarantee the best is yet to come. Great article, Jane.