Written quietly during my COVID isolation, just months before turning 30. A wrinkle, a perfume, and the quietest kind of turning point.
It was just the other day—last week, I think—when I checked myself in the mirror and noticed something unfamiliar. Something I had expected would come eventually, but didn’t think would show up quietly on a random Tuesday.
A wrinkle. Right at the corner of my eyes.
I stood there, dumbfounded. Not horrified, not sad. Just… still. As if the moment itself had put its hand on my shoulder and whispered, “You’re aging, my dear.”
I suppose it’s the same way people feel when they find their first gray hair. A mix of nostalgia, curiosity, and a strange, quiet grief. Not for youth, necessarily—but for the version of ourselves who thought we’d never get old. That girl, with her high-functioning metabolism and an aversion to SPF, has quietly left the room.
We are aging—and hopefully, gracefully.
Turning thirty was supposed to feel celebratory. I imagined marking it with a bold balayage on my shoulder-length hair, buying a good handbag for work, finally choosing a signature perfume to mark my arrival into what I thought was “real adulthood.” Maybe that perfume was meant to smell like confidence, clarity, or at the very least, the kind of woman who keeps her drawer organized and never runs out of toilet paper.
But when the wrinkle came, I was six days into having Covid, and five days into being alone in my house. Ahmed was gone for a while—separated by necessity—and suddenly, the house felt unbearably still.
I didn’t know I was this dependent on the presence of another human.
I didn’t know I needed company to feel like I existed.
What hit me harder than the fever was the silence. Not dramatic, not cinematic—just a slow, daily silence that crept up around the furniture and curled itself into my lungs. And there it stayed.
I’ve always been someone who writes. Or at least, I used to. Journaling was how I found myself. Writing was the thread that pulled me back from unraveling. And now, without writing, I feel like I’ve been moving through fog.
Maybe that’s why the wrinkle shook me so much. Because time never stopped, even when I did.
There will always be a moment in life where you start questioning every decision you’ve made. Not with bitterness, but with bewilderment. “How did I end up here?” And sometimes, the only way forward is to light a candle, spray that grown-up perfume on your wrist, and write again. Even if you don’t know what to say yet.
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