Tuesday. The barista asks your name and how old you were on your last birthday. The second question is not entirely out of place; he likes the broach you're wearing and you tell him it was a birthday gift. He asks if your birthday is soon.
water
Yes. You tell him it was yesterday.

Well, happy belated birthday.

On your most recent birthday, you were 9teen. Some synesthetes* associate numbers with personality (You have never liked the number 4. She isn't trust worthy). 9 is slouching and self-conscious. You write it down and it either hunches or leans backward awkwardly. It is either toppling over or falling into itself. 9 always looks uncomfortable. Over sixty types of synesthesia have been recorded but the neuroscientists cannot tell you why 9 is so very awkward. 9’s eyes are cast downward; he is not telling you something.

You think of the time when you went the first week or so of knowing a person before he asked your age. You were 18, which is twice 9 and perhaps twice the awkward. He wanted to take you out for a drink. Well, you said-

He was surprised. He wasn’t entirely displeased.

You also remember being 9 years old. Ten years ago you were sitting in the backyard during a hot Texas summer. You baptized your dog in the swimming pool. She sneezed. You felt guilty. The dog was afraid of water. She was black and shaped like a barrel with short triangle ears and golden eyes that made your uncles uncomfortable. Your ninth birthday party took place in that same pool where you saved the soul of an animal. Nine was, generally, waterlogged.

And now you are 9teen. On this birthday the only thing you wanted to be was alone because you feel like good company. You wanted to sit somewhere quiet and display poor posture, like the pre-pubescent number 9. But adding tens years to 9 takes away the gaucheness. You speak eloquently to three generations of family over green tea, sushi, celebratory fish cakes.

And now, a day later, you are standing and you are looking at the trees and the trees and the spaces between the trees on the porch of your parents’ house. The wood is warm beneath your feet and the cat is hopping on the roof of the dogs’ house. His feet are always warm. House pets, cats and dogs, run about four degrees warmer than humans all the live long day.

You are warm as well. Burned, you look as if you are in a two-week long full-body blush. If you are embarrassed, it is because of the shiver. Like fever, sunburn gives the illusion of making you colder. And you remember living close to the equator when your definition of cold was anything less than seventy degrees Fahrenheit or any day when the sun wasn’t out.

You remember deserts. Your legs are pealing and scaly as you launch into this very personal new year. The pealing scales are unlike snakes molting, more brackish, as in cracked white dirt beds left after slow evaporation in salt flats.

There was no water on your birthday. 9teen will be thirsty.

You need ocean. Specifically, the Pacific.

Though, you will not see a salted body of water for three months.

*Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which neurological pathways fuse and senses become associated with each other. 1 in 23 people experience it in some form. Adventitious synesthesia is often experienced under the influence of psychedelic drugs, after a stroke. Common forms include personification (associating characters in a number sequence or days and months on the calendar as having personality), grapheme (associating letters and numbers with specific colors that do not change over time), sound-color (sound is experienced as a visual and auditory event) the rarest form is lexical (letters and words are experienced as having tastes that do not change over time). Intensity of experience varies between synesthetes; many do not discover that other people do not experience sense in the same way until late in life.