“ID?” asked the woman in the ticket booth.

“Sure,” I said, my left hand fumbling through my purse. At last I extracted my wallet and showed her my ID.

“Could you please take it out?”

“Of course.” I unsheathed the card from beneath the plastic and handed it sweetly to her.

“Jessamyn Trimble,” she muttered, “date of birth eleven twenty-four oh-one?”

“Yep, that’s me.”

“Ms. Trimble,” she said, looking up, “pardon me, but you don’t look twenty.”

“I get that a lot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be sorry,” I assured her, as she typed away at her keyboard.

“Actually,” she said, “please forgive me, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I can’t see you as being any younger than forty, ma’am—”

“Biologically I’m fifty-two.”

“Wait what?”

“I was born thirty-two. It’s been twenty years, and thirty-two plus twenty is fifty-two. So you’re not wrong—”

“You were born thirty-two?”

“Yep. At birth I was a thirty-two-year-old woman.”

“But how?”

“By C-section. You see, I was five-foot-six, so a bit too big for a vaginal birth—”

“No, I mean, I just don’t understand how you can be born … thirty-two! How does that even work?”

“Well, none of us in the hospital room really understood either. I had to kind of help sort things out, explain to the midwife and the nurses that I really had just been born, even though they literally had just delivered me, and then comfort my mum, I don’t think she or my dad expected me to be thirty-two, also she’s a couple years younger than me, but we get along fine.”

The woman was now staring at me speechless, her face contorted into an expression that I can only describe as pure unadulterated WTF. That was an entirely normal reaction, though. Everybody I’ve had to explain this to ends up in various states of shock.

“There’s so much wrong in that,” she finally managed to say, “I don’t even know where to begin.”

“Well, you’re not alone—everybody I’ve had to explain this to, hospitals, government, airlines, they all have the same reaction as you. Lost a lot of boyfriends this way, too, even the more considerate ones still got all worked up about whether this was technically pedophilia, but in the end—”

“Ma’am,” she said, flustered, “none of this makes any damn sense. At all. People are born at zero. Everyone starts out at zero years old.”

“How do you know that?”

A passing procession of luggage trolleys rattled by.

“You know what?” she said. “Here’s your ticket, have a good flight.”