When I was ten, a teacher told me I had a reading age of fifteen. I never really found out what that meant, and by the time I reached fifteen I’d dismissed his opinion as part of that odd obsession teachers have with trying to convince kids that they’re ‘gifted’ or ‘above average’, as if that will inspire them to do their maths homework and turn in projects on time. Nevertheless, the idea of a ‘reading age’ stuck with me, and has made me curious as to how realistic our conceptions of ‘age’ really are. I’ll be twenty-three this May, and sometimes I feel I’m acting my age, but quite often I dream that time has leapt forward or backwards, and I’m plucked from my twenties and thrust into one of the extreme ends of life.

Sometimes, when I un-imagine the present, I’m seven again - loudly introverted, energetic in my independence. Forget work, never mind dealing with other people and their demands - I’ll talk about my grand plans for the future with precisely the same fervour and imagination that inspire my endless monologues (to anyone who’ll listen) on the subjects of dinosaurs, foreign languages, Old Testament personalities or flying cars. I’ll write about flying cars, or build them out of Lego; or I’ll hide in the reading corner with whichever book arrests my interest. Life is about enjoyment, about doing things my own way and avoiding responsibility, and orders are anathema.

More often, I’m sixty-eight and retired - from what, I have no idea. But earlier fears and concerns hardly enter my mind now, and I fill my time doing many of the same things I did at age seven. I’ll waste whole mornings reading about how those smart palaeontologists reconstructed the habits of theropods by matching their teeth to bite-marks on sauropod ribs, then spend the afternoon pondering how people can learn anything just by looking at bones, and wondering how it all fits with the creation story I was taught in Sunday school. I’ll buy a box of Lego and lose the instructions, then build secret bases for flying cars. In my dream I don’t know whether I’m married, whether I have children or grandchildren, because the dream isn’t about the important parts of life. It’s a dream of quiet, of simple curiosity and unashamed idleness.

Just now, I returned from one of the ends of my life - whether the spring or the autumn, I’m not sure. I settled into my body, found that it has stopped growing, but hasn’t yet begun the slow decline into senescence. I have all the hair and teeth I will ever call my own, and only the suggestion of laughter-lines and arthritic joints. My life is oddly connected to others - no constantly-present parents, no children or lover - few human beings demand much from me, or can be expected to invest their hopes and fears in me. When I was seven, when I was sixty-eight, I expected the world to keep changing, and didn’t care as long as I could do what I wanted. Now that I’m myself again, life is arrested and lacks dynamism, and I care less and less about enjoying myself.

I don’t know what to expect from twenty-three, or from any age thereafter. But when the world starts turning again, I’ll be ready for it. At seven, I learned to expand my mind through reading about the world. At sixty-eight, I learned to forsake the world, to turn back in on myself. Today, I learned that I’m someone else entirely. Me, aged almost twenty-three. I’ll define what that means as I go.