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Zenosyne

KIELE RAYMOND

According to the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, Zenosyne is “the sense that time keeps going faster.” Joey and I used these terms as a jumping off point to think about how change can be experienced in so many different ways.

My daughter turns seventeen tomorrow. She was born in 2000, and that felt very neat and tidy at the time. Clean slate, etc. Her birthday still feels like a kind of completion each year, coinciding usually with the moment I stop messing up the date on my checks or dentist forms. When I was younger, a new adult, I used to cock my head at receptionists and ask, “What year is it again?” I thought it made me seem relatable.

My daughter is a New Yorker. She doesn’t do stuff like that. Or maybe she will, when the edge of girlhood wears off and she needs to feel seen for a little while. Now, though, she doesn’t need those tethers. She’s out tonight. I don’t know where exactly because she deleted Uber from our phones. They were on the wrong side of a protest. Downtown somewhere, she said. I pay the cashier, throw the overpriced syrup in my bag. We’ll have pancakes when she wakes up.

My daughter is a feminist. She has the language to fight, or rather, she knows what is no longer up for debate. Once she told me to stop calling myself a tomboy. I wanted her to know it was okay, but she can tell when I’m forcing it. Like with Belle and Sebastian. She used to love it when she was a kid, but now it’s charged. She feels infantilized; she shrinks into the passenger seat.

My daughter hates odd numbers. Seventeen will be an in-between year for her. I do this thing where I figure out how old I am by adding her age—the last two numerals of the current year, that is—to the age I was in 2000. The math feels easier that way. Like it’s rooted somehow. I can see our living room window from this stretch of 148th. She left the light on. I hear the cars rushing along the Hudson and cannot wait to be home.