Oi ying in wonderment and into the looking glass

Because time is only the relationship between the way different things change, like the earth going round the sun and atoms vibrating and clocks ticking and day and night and waking up and going to sleep....And this means that time is a mystery, and not even a thing and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is exactly.
-Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time

In approx. 12 days, I will turn 21. And usually when people reach a certain milestone in their lives, they ask questions (doesn't matter which kind)but they do. the ones that are currently in my head include :

How shall I celebrate my birthday?
Can I afford anything big?
Why do I not feel like an adult?
Where am I headed in life?
What is that sound I'm hearing downstairs?
Am I still the same person I was 10 years ago?
How am I different?
What's for dinner

[the list goes on]

All the nonsensical questions alongside the serious ones are all mashed in there, somewhere in my mind.

But I wonder,

still, who is in there inside me and inside the mirror.
Now, that I'm turning 21 (soon). I must admit, I still don't have a clue. Not a solid proof that I know exactly who I am.
Maybe it's because we are always always changing. Always becoming someone different every instant with every new experience and every new person we meet. Maybe who we are will always just be that one step ahead of us(the conscious us). So that we'll always only catch its shadow. But that's the amazing thing isn't it? The infinte possibility of a lifetime? Yeah yeah, there's all the talk about predestined fate. maybe we don't really have the choice, but I've never been here anyway. The future still feels like its a blank page even if our hands are destined to write only in a certain way.

I am convinced (though not entirely) that people around me, parents, siblings, old friends get fixated at certain points in my life. They know that old you like they know 'certainty'. They know you from the moment their lives crossed yours. And they will always see you through that coloured glass of that old you. But somehow, they get fixed there. They will always love and miss that old you. even though part of you have already moved on, you're already someone else, and meeting new people who crosses your path at this very point in life. Maybe that's what our lives are: a collection of moments. The complex interplay between new and old, past and present, the known and the unknown. Ha! Maybe at the end of the day, turning 21 will just be another of these moments. Something, I'll live through and then becomes a mystery, like time itself. But such is life... One great big mystery.