Each year during the weeks preceding my birthday, I have an existential crisis. Not in an “oh-shit-I’m-getting-older-and-thus-much closer-to-death” way as youth is never a sanctuary for death; the last three years have been proof of that. Instead, these episodes are more of an “oh-shit-the-passage-of-time-is-an-absurd-thing-and-as-it-continues-all-that-is-happening-now-I-will-eventually-come-to-look-back-on-with-nostalgia” thing. Despite these I feel more settled in my skin now than I ever have. Age is not a curse for me, and truthfully something I’ve only come to consider as others make a fuss about it on my behalf. I look forward to cronehood with excitement and anticipation. When acid creeps up into my esophagus and burns in my chest after eating pizza (when it never used to), I drink ginger tea. When silver hairs appear where they had not been previously, I stand before the mirror and marvel. I’m still me, but changing. What a paradox!

I visited the butterfly pavilion at the Natural History Museum on its final day and considered this next birthday, my thoughts ironically punctuated by the delighted shrieks of the children also visiting the exhibit. A pair of monarch butterflies hung off a tree branch locked tightly together in the throes of a courtship ritual. I asked the guide standing next to me how long the pair might live.

“They have about a six week lifespan,” I could hear her smiling through her mask. So the courtship ritual had to count then.

“Basically,” she nodded as a glittering blue morpho landed in her hair.

I tried calculating how many butterfly lifespans I’ve lived as I went inside the hall dedicated to the mammal exhibit. I had made none of my courtship rituals count: an evolutionary failure. Bones of distant ape-cousins lay arranged neatly underneath glass, all that is left of them millions of years after they took their last breath. I wondered if anyone would look at my bones that way: a skull with crooked teeth, a string of gold beads loosely draped around my iliac crests. Would some alien scientist make educated guesses about me like the ones I was reading in the paragraphs in the display? “Toxicological analysis of the bones of this specimen (known in the scientific community as ‘Miss Thang’) revealed traces of cannabis, suggesting recreational use.”

Death (and the life after it) seemed rather grotesque then in that hall, not the gradual, natural conclusion to everything that I generally assumed it was in the Before Time or even the sudden, shocking end that it had become for me since. The taxidermied animals stood stiffly, pitifully as I walked past them towards the gift shop. What an end, I thought to myself squeezing the smilodon plush animal I bought in the back of the ride home.

I think I would prefer to become dust undisturbed.