Hiding under the neon lights, the curly-haired boy asked me if I was using a fake, too. “Sorry,” I mumbled, confused why thoughts of his mother now consumed me. At work, my coworkers found out I will be 22 soon. I see their image of me once blurry as I had engineered through vague comments and outright lies sharpen into focus on the form of an ingenue. My round, cherubic face pinkens as I want to remind them I have been here 8 years, but only a child would validate their own professional identity. The woman with hands like unmade sheets tells me that my generation can't seem to wake up early enough for birding, that we don’t value life’s natural gifts. I wonder if she heard me on the phone later, counseling a grieving daughter while my friends had to awkwardly pause the collective girlhood memory we had been forming that Saturday morning. My mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year. I think of the massage I’ve been meaning to get for the past 3 years, and the visit to a podiatrist I have considered, but she always thinks I am joking, so I smile and say nothing. When my alarm goes off at five in the morning, and I roll from my floor mattress, I regret witholding from my mother. I like starting my day before the sun, acknowledging the scattered headlights of others just as weary when I see the flock of starlings. I am reminded now of the first time I bathed a cold human form, how I reminded myself that this was a woman who lived and loved, not a task to be charted, and how the starlings had gathered by her window as if to accompany her that evening. I want to go back and tell the rugae-skinned woman that my generation saw birds at all hours, but a need for vindication seems childish.