I sat at the edge of an empty second floor bar and threw paper airplanes to the cobbled, narrow streets below. I wanted to see if they could fly and, I think, I wanted to see if I still remembered how to fold the wings like I once had.

An hour earlier, after singing him happy birthday, when my fingers were still sticky from the tres leches cake, I asked Jake, “What do you want to do for the last night of your twenties?”

“I want to eat street tacos. Everything after that is a bonus,” Jake answered enthusiastically.

Real high maintenance guy. Yet thinking back to my own thirtieth birthday, Jake was already winning. We were on holiday for a week in a coastal town in Mexico in late March, ditching our raincoats and sweaters for sunburns and shorts. I had turned thirty in the first month of the pandemic, when everything in the world was locked down tight, and I had a virtual birthday party via video chat.

Yet here I was with my friends, Jake, Matt, Spencer, and my brother, John, drinking two-for-one margaritas and tossing folded up paper into night air. It was my idea. The bar was dead, but I’d seen the opportunity the moment I pulled up the edge of the balcony and saw couples linking arms or groups of spring breakers from California walk by in partially buttoned shirts and too-tight dresses in the street below. It was a perfect place to launch paper airplanes.

“¿Tienes papel y pluma?” I’d asked the bored looking waiter.

He promptly provided his notepad and a pen, handing them away like he was glad to have something to do.

“What should we write?” I asked the guys, pen in hand.

I could see the wheels turning in Jake’s head but the other three barely paid any mind, they were busy passing out cards from the We’re Not Really Strangers game and taking turns to ask each other questions like: Have you ever checked an ex’s phone? Or, What compliment do you think I get most?

So, I went to work on my own and scribbled down whatever came to mind.

Look at your toes. See a rainbow. Taste a watermelon.

Do you think the sun gets bored of rising in the east?

What’s your favorite thing about you?

¿Dónde has estado toda mi vida?

The guys, as it turned out, were excited about the folding bit, taking sheets of paper from me as soon as I finished writing on them. Matt had taken a couple blank pages of the notepad for himself. Jake folded a perfect looking plane while Spencer and I tried to figure out which creases went where. Matt and I tossed the first two.

Mine was a snub-nosed thing that looked more like a rectangle that went end over end and tumbled to the sidewalk. It was a relief that no one had noticed its fall.

Matt’s flew straight for a second before it dove like a lawn dart.

John was tense the whole time, side-eyeing us like an embarrassed father, while he sipped his margarita and gritted his teeth.

“I don’t like the optics,” he told me when I asked. “You know, Americans throwing trash on the street in Mexico.”

He was a total killjoy. I wanted to argue with him that a note bearing airplane was a far better life for a sheet of paper than taking the orders of entitled tourists. It felt like he had made me out to be some sort of child. I hated that part of me agreed with him.

So, we downed our drinks, tucked the paper airplanes into our shirts like pocket squares, and walked out into the night.

In the street, I handed one of the planes to a young woman who walked a little too crooked for nine-thirty in the evening.

“What’s this?” she called to my back.

I turned around as I walked away.

“A paper airplane,” I said loudly, gesturing my arm in a tossing motion.

She squealed in excitement, then launched the plane toward one of her friends. I watched as the plane flew for ten feet and fell softly to the ground. Not bad, I thought. Then a young man from her group rushed to pick it up, saying, “Let me try it,” but one of his buddies rushed him and got to it first.

I turned my back to them and fell in with the guys. Matt walked next to me, a cigarette smoldering in his right hand, and he turned to me with a grin.

“Kids, am I right?” he said.