Memories.

One year ago tonight I was called up eight flights of white limestone stairs to the front office of the Jerusalem Center to receive my very first package. It contained two new shirts, a mix CD, and a hundred dollar bill rolled up the size of a fat toothpick and hidden inside a card so the Israeli government wouldn't confiscate it at customs.

One year ago tomorrow I woke covered in rose petals to my all-time favorite birthday present:

Candles in two heaping mugs of peanut butter and Nutella swiped from the Oasis, pretzels, Israeli cookies, a letter from my mom, a bag of birthday candy, fresh flowers, and paper hearts taped all around the room listing "19 fabulous facts about our favorite 19-year-old roommate." I will always love my Jerusalem roommates Bethany, Hannah, and Katherine for getting up so incredibly early to make me so incredibly happy. And it didn't end there. Bethany had taken the trouble to collect happy birthday wishes from my extended family and friends all the way across the globe and she had dispersed them in note form to people all over the JC to give to me at random so they lasted the whole day. It was the loveliest and most thoughtful gift I've ever had and I still keep one of the notes bookmarked in my scriptures.

I took a New Testament final that day that actually went terribly, but I was in such a happy birthday state that it barely affected me. I was way too wired to do any serious study beforehand, so Cary played me "Jesus Christ Superstar" on his laptop as we sat on the couch outside the Forum. After New Testament I blitz-memorized my student manual for the Field Trip final and then relaxed with Arrested Development in one of the study rooms. Later that night we visited the Western Wall to welcome the Sabbath with the local Jewish population and I made a very special birthday wish/prayer and folded it into the wall. I finished out my first day as a nineteen-year-old in the Center enjoying homemade peach cobbler and a rocking dance party.

And today I finished out my last day as a nineteen-year-old at my sixteenth-floor desk in a research lab at Children's Hospital in Boston learning the ins and outs of graphic design for my very first scientific poster. I took pictures of tibias I sectioned at 10 microns and stained with alcian blue and nuclear fast red, alizarin red, and hematoxylin and eosin; I scanned my last cell culture plates into my laptop and quantified them with ImageJ according to a protocol I developed myself; and I gathered all my summer data and compiled them into something aesthetically beautiful--soft sea greens and whites complement my myriad graphs, significance levels, and cell culture stats. It's entitled "Functional Role of Telomerase-Expressing Mesenchymal Stem Cells in Skeleton" and it's going to be wonderful.

Tomorrow I'll be twenty.
And now, eighteen-year-old-self, it's time to answer your question.
No, I'm not detached. I feel twenty.
I feel accomplished. I feel like a good scientist. I feel like a good person. And yes, I feel the breath behind my soul again, though not in the same way. I guess that means I'm changing.