She asked my age. Something flickered across her face. “I’m twenty-six,” she said, as if it were bad news she had received only recently. “It isn’t the age I feel like.” “What age do you feel like?” “Nineteen—like you.” But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.
