My friends and I would play a game in middle school reserved for the crackhead hours of our sleepovers – the hours past midnight when the streetlamps would distort the shadows on the living room ceiling and the shapes of all our brain cells. The game was essentially when was I conceived? and consisted of us time-traveling back nine months before our birth dates to hypothesize over why, how, and where our parents had decided to get it on. For example, Emily was born in September, which makes her a Christmas conception. This is incredibly romantic, as it evokes pinterest images of holiday lights and toasty amber fires and all that great sugary gingerbread stuff. I was born in June which traces back to September, in fact the very September Emily was born considering the age gap. In one of our sessions of when was I conceived? Emily’s face creased with an inappropriate smirk and horrified eyes when she came to the incorrect realization that I could have been conceived on 9/11. I told her no, I’m a 2001 baby so I was already in the world by 9/11. She was disappointed at the loss of the scandal. We then concluded my parents must have smashed in September because they’re both teachers, and they probably got excited over the discount highlighter situation at a back-to-school sale.
Even though my parents didn’t fuck on 9/11, my birth date was still a bit of a scandal. I was born on 6/13. This was a big problem for my grandmother because Filipinos (mostly of the elderly variety) can be very superstitious, and 6 and 13 are S-tier superstitious numbers. She told my mom to simply hold the baby in, which didn’t end up being effective. So out I came, a perfectly healthy, chubby little roll of an infant that fed well, slept well, played well. My grandma decided to just bury my umbilical stump to make sure I grew up to be smart and then called it a day.
The horror began when I turned two. This is the age where, in gremlin-fashion, much like the ripe, unnerving eclipse of a swollen moon, I became an absolute terror. The highlights of my personal dark ages consist of the following: pinching my dad’s nose until it bled, renouncing anything chocolate-flavored, screaming at museums, shoving my little caterpillar fingers into automatic pencil sharpeners to watch my mom squirm, sitting on priceless sculptures, hitting my older sister with a golf club, hitting my older sister with a brick, hitting my older sister with a baseball bat, eating bowls of raw sugar, running up to the altar during mass, running away in shopping malls, and rage-crying at Disney On Ice. However, like all storms, this one broke apart, and I soon found myself mellowed and profoundly more boring. Much to the relief of everyone around me.
I forgot about numbers. I became an English major just to spite them. I was a soft, sensitive bean living in a pseudo-angsty shell, concerned only with the truths in literature. I was sensitive, emotion-driven, intuitive, which all seemed to contradict the objectivity of numbers. Numbers transformed into spirits that loomed in the atmosphere and I was happy living without them.
But they came back to me decades later in a stupid internet ad asking me to pay money for a very real psychic, which I do believe in, but have a hard time trusting when they spell “angel” like “angle” and tell me my ancestors are calling me to give them my credit card information. Tiptoeing around the scammers, the ad said something about core numbers, which comes from a metaphysical practice known as numerology. Everyone has three core numbers – the life path number, the soul urge number, and the destiny number. These numbers, based on your birthdate and the letters of your full birth name, allegedly hold some deeper truth about your inner nature. So I thought screw it and I did the numbers game to calculate my core numbers – life, soul, and destiny – which are, respectively, 4, 8, and 2.
Life path number 4.
A practical and grounded headstone for stability concerned with justice and honesty. Concerned more about respect than material goods. Highly organized and hard-working, focused on the ultimate goal of providing a stable life for oneself and their loved ones. A forward-thinker and a wallflower, sometimes even dull.
Soul urge number 8.
Extremely focused on money and material goods. Highly determined and obsessed with power, experiencing high highs and low lows. A generous giver but known for butting heads with authority figures.
It was around reading 2 out of 3 of my core numbers that numbers were back around to muddle my every self-conception possible. Practical, dull, obsessed with power. I was ready to bury them back into a box under my bed and forget they existed, but some sick, twisted feeling in my gut wanted me to read the last one.
Destiny number 2.
Born to be a diplomat and peacekeeper. Highly emotional and naturally affectionate. Focuses on caring for and connecting with others. Deeply intuitive and known to follow gut feelings. Sensitive and empathetic, yet protective of their relationships.
This is the part where I tell you I had a spirit-shaking, trembling epiphany about the Truth of the Universe and how I fit into it like a cosmic puzzle piece flowing into a greater tapestry and insert more metaphors of grandeur here. But the actual truth is numbers tell me nothing about my nature. In fact, they always seem to tangle it up even more. Sometimes numbers are hypothetical pitfalls I’m meant to overcome, catastrophes people say I’m side-stepping. Sometimes they’re plain mean and call me dull. Other times, numbers flatter me and reflect some fragment of myself that may or may not be caught up in my own head.
Numbers, I’ve decided, are finicky little tricksters that function like the pantheon of Greek gods. We worship them so much and we place all of our trust in them like these omniscient beings. It’s not that I doubt their potential mystical forces, but I am mighty suspicious about how we worship them. We burrow ourselves into numbers because it makes us forget how small we actually are, swimming in this expanding ether of chaos and playing all sorts of number games to figure out how we’re positioned, when there actually is no up or down or left or right or this way or that. There’s just existing, and a slim material chunk of this existing that can be fractionally explained with numbers. But existing is mostly just a wadded up hairball of weird, terrifying, lovely things. And I don’t know if it’s just me or the existential crisis talking, but maybe numbers are just as scared as us, or even more scared because we expect them to have all the answers all the time when they’re just trying to get through the day, looking for their own higher forces to take refuge in when everything builds up into this big intimidating mass you’re navigating. Am I projecting onto arbitrary signs now? Yeah. Is my head reeling with the validity of destiny, free will, and the divine powers in which I choose to place all of my hopes and dreams? For sure.
But my parents didn’t fuck on 9/11, so it’s all good.