At age six, I was sitting at the dining table with the scent of pork and damp dough wafting toward me, which only encouraged the growling of my impatient stomach. When my parents brought out the dumplings, positioned perfectly on their platters, my fingers found their way to my chopsticks to ready them for attack.
“How many can I have?” I asked.
“You can eat your age,” my mom replied. “Six dumplings for six years.”
Six sounded like a small number to my greedy stomach, but I dutifully snatched up six dumplings, still fresh and steaming, into my bowl. I was jealous of my sister, who was currently filling up her bowl with ten.
As I took my last bite of the sixth piece, mouth filling with savory soup and chewy skin, it turned out that six was the perfect number for me. Not too little and not too much. My sister laid down on the couch and rubbed her stomach in fullness, and I laughed and danced around her.
As I grew, my allotted dumpling number grew with me. Seven dumplings at age seven, eight at age eight, and so on. The practice must have stopped around twelve or thirteen, when my stomach had finally reached its limit. Without a second thought, the habitual occurrence every time a plate of dumplings was placed before me had vanished. A tradition fallen into obscurity. I had simply outgrown it.
It has been a while since this little ritual has even crossed my mind. I am turning twenty-one soon, and although I could swallow down twenty-one dumplings if I really tried, it would not be the same. The childish charm has been replaced with bittersweet nostalgia. What other character quirks have I forgotten? Would I be able to pull them out of my memory if I try? It is overwhelming and stupid how much this matters to me. It is an insignificant and useless concept; I cannot stop my memory from fading any more than I can slow down time.
Twenty-one is the age of adulthood. I do not feel like an adult, but I can feel myself rising out of the engrained roots of childhood. I am grasping so tightly onto my remaining connections that they have almost become tedious to me. Books I used to love, music I used to emanate with, TV shows I used to binge. I force myself to relive them – reading laboriously, listening lazily, watching inattentively. In my desperation to cling to them, I have beaten them half to death. I cannot recreate what it was like to indulge in these as a child, no matter how hard I try, no matter how hard I want to. I must face the fact, I have outgrown them as well.
I do not understand why maturity is so daunting to me. I think it is the inescapable nostalgia that haunts me, even after I lose the memories attached to it. It is the nagging feeling of missing something I cannot remember. My old memories are a constant leaking faucet flowing out to make room for new ones, and I am not ready to replace them. I wish I had more brain capacity.
But more than that, I wish I had more stomach capacity. If I could, just once more, eat my age in dumplings before I am officially twenty-one, I would. It does not matter that the touch of innocence in the act is no longer lingering, it does not seem right to start off adulthood without hanging on to one more piece of childhood.