Twenty-nine.

And we're off to the races.

I decided sometime in the past couple of years that a year doesn't truly begin until after the Lunar New Year has passed. Therefore, the time between January 1st and the variable date of the Lunar New Year is a liminal space, a calm before the storm that is the remainder of the year. During this limbo, I spare every effort and I laze about. It's the opposite of committing myself to a set of New Year's resolutions—my blood pressure can't, won't, accept any more stress.

When I was in elementary school, we lived in a one-story home on a street named after a common flower. The internet wasn't yet what it would be and life was still lived offline, so my free time was always spent outdoors. I used to wade through my neighbors' front lawns and bushes, looking for ladybugs and butterflies. Back then, suburbanites weren't quite so afraid of each other, and nobody begrudged the little Chinese boy his frequent incursions onto their property. I was harmless, and I was precocious.

Later, when I inherited a bicycle, my world opened wider. I rode across countless neighborhood blocks, keen to explore and set on discovering parks and greenspaces, as if they were secrets to be revealed to the curious. My imagination ran wild, unchecked.

In my little bathtub in our quaint suburban home, I busied myself. Sometimes, I brought with me my Game Boy Color console to play as I bathed, and I once dropped the device into the water. It was completely waterlogged, drowned, and I couldn't revive it. Desperate, I handwrote a letter to Nintendo and mailed it with my Game Boy, explaining to them as a child would that mistakes happen but maybe they would be able to fix it. Weeks—or perhaps even months—later, they wrote me back, and they included a factory new console. I was ecstatic.

That bathroom was the scene of many of my personal dramas. In there, I remember thinking about my mortality. I had just learned to think about death, and I tried very hard to imagine it. I pictured myself in my late 90s, lying in a hospital bed. I figured that that could be a natural end. What happens when one dies? I thought and I thought, and then I realized it would be like the end of being able to think. My brain would turn off and my consciousness would fade to nothing, and the ceaselessness of my thinking was a rudder that would slow to a stop as I left the world.

It terrified me. The idea of everything melting into nothing, it was too much for me to handle. I burst into hysterical tears. My parents, who had come over to see what was wrong, were bewildered at how upset I was about death. I was too young to be thinking about such things.

A couple years later, I came across the principle of mass conservation. I liked to read about science. Although it may be rearranged, mass can neither be created nor destroyed. That presented a new counterpoint to my thoughts about death, my fear of dissipating into nothingness. The laws of the universe dictating the constancy of matter implied to me the possibility of reincarnation, of life beyond death. No longer would I have to be afraid of my consciousness vanishing; it would reconstitute itself elsewhere, perhaps in another body, bringing me back as another being. The cycle of life would continue.

But, consciousness isn't material—it is ephemeral—and this is wholly unscientific and perhaps bordering on spiritualism. If it is not tangible, if it is not matter but instead the electric byproduct of the neurons in my brain firing away, even if my far-fetched concept of conservation applied here, could consciousness be preserved? After all, few others alive today can recall their past lives. I, a child, feared the hard truth. I was afraid of the answer being no, because that would assign such finality to the present, such frailty to being.

This New Year, I'm thinking about the impermanence of life. How feeble it is, how easily it strips away—as I face my mortality, all else is insignificant. How precious the few decades I'm allotted are before my grand adventure here comes to a close.

I wonder what he would think of me, that child version of me, my self from over two decades ago. He's a construct I've created in my mind, I know, but I'm afraid of letting him down. I keep telling myself that I can't waste any more time, I can't fail myself any more, because I've already burned through three decades and I don't know what I have to show for it. I'd like to live the rest of my life to the fullest. I don't know how much longer I've got.