I respect birthdays, and I always give myself permission to spend them doing whatever I want. This year, however, pinpointing that was hard. Nothing felt worth the effort.

It took a while to realize that what I really wanted was unattainable. You can’t re-insert yourself back in time.

Despite that, I woke up on my birthday knowing that I wanted to walk.

I started from home, heading toward the town where I’d attended college. That university was the beginning of why I live where I do now. I’m not from here and never intended to stay.

Many of the buildings that existed back then are gone, but they lived again for me, superimposed against the urban revitalization that now occupies their space. I followed the route I’d once taken daily, from the house I shared with housemates I enjoyed, past the magazine-store job that brought me excellent friends (and hardly any money), down along the main street to the university.

One era merged into a slightly earlier one as my route continued past the apartment I lived in when I first arrived for school. Impressions of the university were stronger here, along with the uncertainty of living on my own for the first time. The school has expanded, filling up once-empty spaces and gobbling up many of my old haunts.

I passed through a friend’s neighborhood and remembered his exuberance and endless trove of stories. A walk like this can’t help but call up shadows of people who were once major parts each day and now exist only in memory. I wondered how their stories evolved, how the rest of their lives unfolded. I considered reaching out — that’s both the pro and the con of the internet, after all; answers are just a Google search away. But sometimes there are good reasons why people have drifted into memory, and if you wouldn’t contact them in person, maybe it’s best to leave things the way they are.

I left my college days and entered the outer orbit of places my very young children and I traveled when running errands from home in the city. My sweet girls were usually happy, ready for adventures at the grocery store or playground, lighting my world just by being in it.

I’d been right, of course. You can’t immerse yourself in memory. Recollection itself changes as layers of experience and understanding deepen our perspective of even events we thought we knew well. I think we’re supposed to do that. There’s beauty in studying the fabric of our lives and finally seeing purpose in the design.

But time is more spiral than linear, and my walk had never been about visiting the past in the first place. Re-circling my younger self in all her vital, naïve glory has its wince-worthy moments, but she also possesses attributes I could use now. I need her hope, her fierceness, her sense of possibility as the whole world opens before her. I need to re-introduce myself to her so that energies of past and present can flow together in clarity and strength for this next uncertain leg of the journey.

We’ll see how I do.

If my grandmother had been into astrology–which she wasn’t–maybe she’d have been annoyed to discover that after spending her life reading Virgo’s horoscope, her real sun sign was Cancer. If she’d been prone to pondering her personal history (again, not too useful in my grandmother’s world), it might have been a little disappointing to realize that all the childhood milestones she’d accomplished so precociously ahead of her peers were actually right on schedule given her true age. Even basic facts, like the age gaps between Rachel and her siblings, shifted just because my grandfather decided to root through the closet. At the very least, it had to to tweak her perspective a bit to realize that a fundamental fact she’d believed all her life was wrong.

But Rachel being Rachel, she plowed through my grandfather’s “older woman” jokes and came out with the solution she liked best: she would now celebrate both birthdays each year. The change-the-date notice didn’t rock her world at all, and maybe she was right. Other than a potential paperwork nightmare, what was different?

The stats on my grandmother’s birth certificate offer a snapshot of the beginning of her life. They give us her (correct) birthdate, her family’s address at her birth, her parents’ names, ages, country of origin, and the number of siblings awaiting her arrival. The facts remain constant, but they take on more depth as my grandmother defines her world with the pieces life gives her. Both names on her birth certificate — Rachael Levy — change, the second name through two marriages and the spelling of the first for a reason known only to the reborn “Rachel.” The Lower East side address gets swapped out for locations in the Bronx, Florida, and finally Annapolis. Her parents get older, then pass from her grasp; the number of siblings at home increases, then wanes as everyone leaves home for individual paths. The birth certificate can’t show what my grandmother made of her life. It can’t show her lifelong devotion to her mother, her bond with her sisters, the resilience she somehow found in her early forties when her husband died suddenly, leaving her with four children to support and continue raising.

Palmists read both palms when giving readings, believing that the nondominant hand shows what a person was given at birth, while the dominant hand shows what has become of those attributes. I think of my grandmother’s birth certificate as her nondominant hand, her launching pad. But while the circumstances surrounding her birth certainly impacted her life, what she made of that life also added dimension to the facts preserved on the birth certificate. Who she became and the choices she made increased the meaning of otherwise static figures.

My grandmother’s decision to celebrate both birthdays each year meant that we could potentially get into trouble if we forgot either one. So, I’m not forgetting. Happy (sort of) Birthday, Grandma Rachel, wherever you may be. I hope you’re having a wonderful time defining yourself however you please!