the cure
turning 26 in ocean city, maryland
I have never known a birthday without the beach. Part of it has to do with growing up in a coastal town, the rest has to do with having a birthday near the end of May. End of May and early June is every beach town’s summer kickoff. It’s when the annual tourists come flocking to town, clogging up lines at favorite local dives and driving up the prices of parking.
Even when I’m not near the shore on my birthday, I’m stuck thinking about it. This is the first year that I decided to embrace that nagging nostalgia. In March, I suggested the idea to my boyfriend that we visit Ocean City. For starters, I have lived in Maryland for six years and before this week never made my trek to OC. No one ever explicitly told me this was weird, but I knew it was.
I’m not naturally an explorer. For up to a year after I graduated college, I didn’t go anywhere that was farther than thirty minutes away. At first I think I was still reluctant to sink my teeth into this new reality: the one where Maryland was my new home state. I couldn’t comprehend it when my sister told me that eventually it would be easier for me to have a Maryland license, a Maryland car registration, and Maryland-based health insurance plan (to this day, I only have 1 out of the 3). It felt too independent. I wanted to be on my own. I didn’t want to cut ties with home completely. Just enough to feel like I could breathe.
But over the past two years, I’ve started to feel more comfortable with Maryland becoming my new home state. Sure…it’s probably because I found my boyfriend, a pure-born, Maryland-loving man. It’s easy to fall in love with a place when you have your own personal guide to teach you about its secrets. There’s more to it though. I’ve created a life here that I love more than the one passed down to me in Jersey. So even if I kept it at a distance for so long, I am ready to embrace Maryland.
The first place Andrew took me was a neighborhood near Ocean City. As a child he grew up visiting his family’s summer home in Ocean Pines. When he first told me this, I couldn’t comprehend it. He had lived the life of a summer tourist. He was part of the crowd who drove up the prices, who made the traffic unbearable, and who had magical summers in a town that didn’t belong to them.
He tells me his experience was far from this. There were no lavish parties and no golden summers with the girl next door. Instead his parents sold the house early in his teen years and it only remains immortalized in a pixelated video taken on his old Nintendo DS.
He repeats the same list of stories when I push for more details, insisting he must be forgetting something. He’s not, but I ask again anyway.
As we drive away from the house, I start to daydream. I want to make my birthday wish right there. One golden summer with him. I feel desperate to rewrite time and have his summers be with me in Jersey. He should’ve been with me. He should’ve been the one tourist I tolerated, the one whose return I craved every May. I discover there that turning 26 still hasn’t fixed this relentless feeling that I missed out on something I can never get back.
Is there a cure for that or is it a part of getting older?
It’s hard to explain where my mind was at. It’s like when people get married and the skeptics say “you’ll never have a first kiss again” or “you’ll never experience first date jitters again.” As you get older, the window on certain experiences starts to close. Or at least it feels that way. I’m not proud of it but with every birthday that passes, I feel that way for a split second.
At 22: I’ll never be considered an ingenue.
At 24: I’ll never be in my early twenties again.
At 26: I’ll never be a careless young adult again.
After the second passes, I push it away. I try not to let it take me in. No one wants to feel that their biological clock is betraying them on their birthday. Not even I, someone who chronically suffers from writer brain, meaning I entertain the weirdest of my thoughts in hopes it can be something I can insert it into a character I write one day.
Later, Andrew takes me to a bookstore, The Buzzed Word. He found it online in order to fulfill my dream of having a book shopping spree. I laugh as he tries to balance the books I pick in his hands.
Famesick by Lena Dunham - She wrote HBO’s Girls, her words are gospel to me.
Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke - The library hold list was too long.
Writers and Lovers by Lily King - It’s been on the TBR for too long.
And Now Back To You by B.K. Borison - First Time Caller made my heart happy.
This Book Made Me Think Of You by Libby Page - Another that’s been in TBR purgatory.
The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke - The only book I didn’t know anything about coming into the store. I went based off of a staff recommendation and a quick-read of the book jacket.
Just Kids by Patti Smith - Everyone says in order to be a creative mind, you must read Patti Smith.
The Deal by Elle Kennedy - Sue me, I got into the Off-Campus hype.
I could have chosen more, Andrew assures me of this. But as much as I love having a boyfriend who can support my wildest spending fantasy, I have too much of a moral compass to indulge myself that much. When we checkout, the owner of the store says she wishes she had a partner that could have done the same for her when she was younger. For longer than I like, I think back to my earlier thought.
I push it down as we go visit the boardwalk.
It’s different than the boardwalk I’m used to. There’s more small stands, an army of seagulls, and instead of the boardwalks of different towns connecting to extend into an 8 mile path, the Ocean City boardwalk is only 3 miles long. When we reach the endpoint, we’re staring at a road that separates us from Assateague Island on the other side.
The weather pushes us inside because of course the year I embrace having a beach birthday, I get crappy weather. It’s probably payback for all the years I denied my true destiny. I get ready for my birthday dinner, which turns out to be at a country club moonlighting as a line-dancing bar for the night. Andrew and I are seated in an empty dining room as the main foyer is filled to the brim of older couples dancing to “Choosin’ Texas: by Ella Langley and strangely “Fireball” by Pitbull. We attempt after our dinner (which included the best chicken piccata I’ve ever had) to join in, but our innate social awkwardness gets the best of us. I can’t think of a right way to introduce ourselves to the hostess who recognizes everyone coming in and Andrew notices the lack of room on the dance floor.
Instead we go to mini golf where a stranger hands me a ticket for a free game, which I take as one of the happy coincidences that just happen on your birthday. We both tie because we suck and all is well. As the night ends, I’m still pacing back and forth over that fact that without even noticing, life has passed by. Doors have closed without me noticing they were ever open. Now every missed opportunity flashes on the giant billboard in my mind and I can’t help but see it every time I close my eyes.
It doesn’t help that that night Olivia Rodrigo releases a song titled “the cure” and she spends it lamenting that her love isn’t the cure to her problems.
I got toxins in my bloodstream
You tried so hard to suck out
And it feels like medication
And it's good for me, I'm sure
But it don't matter how your love feels anymore
It'll never be the cure
Maybe there isn’t a cure, I think. Maybe everyone else is still looking for it. I mean, Olivia Rodrigo still is. She’s 23 though. Then again, I obviously didn’t have it at 23 either. Maybe 26 will be the year I find it.
I have to at least try.