The idea of birthdays used to take over my life when I was young. I would make a countdown to the "special day" out of construction paper and tape it to the fridge to remind my parents on the off chance that they’d forget. Now that I’ve passed the legal mile-marker for adulthood, it’s a subtler affair of low-key dinners as I wait for the paperwork of age to catch up with me. I filed my W-2s this year. It was exactly as enjoyable as it sounds. But has growing up really lost its touch?

I remember being five years old and staying up too late—watching the clock tick slowly past the nine as I clutched Big Bear to my chest, fingers hooked in the holes worn through his bright orange flesh. A whispered mantra echoed in my mind of “a few more hours, just a few more,” as I fell asleep on the hardwood floor. Back then the single tick of the clock moving forward, marking that one year older of a child born at midnight, was a shiver of anticipation, the rush of shrieking joy in my mother’s ear, the imagined edge of carved maturity along my cherub cheeks.

This year I stayed up past 1 a.m. on a friend’s couch, feeling the leather cling uncomfortably to my bare thighs in the late spring heat as we watched a straight-to-DVD rom-com in our pajamas, hands still sticky from homemade ice cream concocted in slippery, salty Ziploc bags.

“Oh it’s Esther’s birthday. Happy Birthday, dude!,” was an aside sometime between putting on the movie and stumbling up to bed in the pitch dark, feet thumping on the patterned carpet. As the air conditioner hissed around the three of us, I stared up at the ceiling and waited for a magic rush of adulthood to sweep from my toes to my fingertips. For that moment of different I missed at 18, at 16, that I was supposed to feel settle around my shoulders like a leaden cloak of responsibility.

I spent the next morning, with their help, dying my hair into a mishmash of pink and purple tips as if it would somehow physically mark my awkward place in the world; sensible brown hair pulled into a bun for convenience, hiding the child’s naiveté in each pastel fingerprint streak.

The difficulty of growing up is not in its earth-shaking newness but rather in how you realize that everything stays the same around your shifting bones and widening worldview. Suddenly, your six-block neighborhood is small, the sidewalks cracked, and--as much as you love stepping back into your childhood home for holidays and summer vacations--the walls constrict tighter with curfews than the tiny dorm room you left behind. The world doesn’t change and nothing is different and somehow it will never be the same again.

I would like to think that 19 is not some grand step into another life where you cast off the trappings of childhood and magically know how to do taxes. It is not the end or the middle or even the beginning, but a continuation of everything that you are.

My birthday wasn’t important for what it represented but rather for every single thing I did that day, from eating cake for breakfast to surprising my totally unprepared Dad with the new hairdo. I refuse to see a ticking clock as a countdown to getting strapped down into the nude pumps of adulthood. I want it to be the memories

writing themselves across my smile, my desk cluttered with ticket stubs, to-do lists, and tea cups, and life.