Two months ago, I turned twenty-one.

It was supposed to feel cinematic in the way people talk about twenty-one: cheap champagne, dim bar lights, too-loud music, blurry photographs, the beginning of something reckless and beautiful. A door opening. A chapter finally starting.

Instead, it felt like the world had already ended before the candles were lit.

Most people spend their twenty-first birthday drinking themselves dizzy or disappearing on some impulsive weekend trip. They celebrate becoming legal. Becoming young in a different way. I spent mine asleep.

At five in the morning on my birthday, I put down my cat, Harvey.

I won’t unravel the whole story because it still feels tangled in floodwater and guilt and all the tiny decisions that split your life into a before and after. But the Skagit River had flooded after a snow storm in the Cascades. Roads disappeared under five feet of water.

The day before, I’d called out of work.. Burnt out from school. I went to Michael’s to buy paint, but somehow wandered into embroidery instead. Needles. Thread. A little kit I didn’t need. One of those strange insignificant choices that later feels cursed.

I spent the evening in bed watching shows with my supplies scattered beside me, completely unaware that ordinary moments can become haunted overnight. Unaware that after that night, I wouldn’t be able to touch a needle or embroider again without remembering him.

The next day, my partner paddle-boarded home after work because the roads were still underwater. We were trapped inside the house with nowhere to go, nothing to do except wait for the river to loosen its grip on everything. While he slept, I embroidered to pass the time.

I left the needle in the fabric when I got up for lunch. Thread still attached.

Later, I saw it in Harvey’s mouth.

Then it was gone.

We searched the entire house in silence that slowly turned frantic. Drawers opened. Blankets thrown aside. Flashlights against the floorboards. But you already know how stories like this end.

Six hours later, the floodwater had dropped just enough for us to take Aidan’s truck into Seattle. The x-ray showed the needle already in Harvey’s small intestine. Thin and bright against the blackness, like a sentence already written.

There were more decisions after that. More fear. More hoping. More regret than I know what to do with.

But in the end, we let him go.

So on my twenty-first birthday, we drove home at sunrise and slept from seven in the morning until two in the afternoon. Then we did laundry. We visited my grandparents. I cried until my chest hurt. Later that night, I wandered through a grocery store under fluorescent lights and bought a bottle of wine and a bottle of prosecco because turning twenty-one still demanded some kind of ritual, even if it felt meaningless by then.

I drank quietly while a movie played in the background.

And that was it.

No crowded bars. No glittering celebration. Just grief, floodwater, exhaustion, and the strange loneliness of surviving a day that was supposed to feel important.

People say wine is bottled poetry.

That night, it tasted more like mourning.