(photo by Rachel Cusick)
Aging seems to be a perpetual falling back ; you rarely feel as if there's any way to stop it, though it's usually happening slowly, the best you can do is nervously peer over your shoulder, glimpsing what fresh trouble or imagined doom expects you next, quite certain that only uncertainty awaits again there for you ; having been told by many that age is somehow an improvement on youth, though 'to always be very careful' : that injuries might no longer heal, but rather sustain. Injuries take on a new power and longevity, they loom and wait, then strike.
The ground seems farther away but somehow moving towards you faster each year as you fall. Stumbling backwards into it goes against instinct, but can not be stopped. Opposite all of this, behind you, your youth is glimpsed surfing away from you as a jumbled collection of fond disasters ; towards the far horizon, laughing, galloping, hysterical, unreachable, delirious with its escape.
One of the most idiotic dumb-isms I've ever heard (other than "great minds think alike") is that, "you're only as old as you feel".... Could anything be more treacherous and obviously circular?... I feel 41 years old. I wake up some days and I've incurred a very serious sports injury during sleep, unable to get out of bed without great pain and bewilderment. I know that the intention of the statement means to 'stay young in your mind', but most of the people who repeat that blathering drivel were never young in the first place, mind or elsewhere. They foolishly believed that life can be saved, hoarded, to be spent at a later date. I keep telling myself that they were wrong.
Well, I was given some very good advice by a friend: to avoid opining here. So I will cut it short there. This seems especially sensible when concerning aging.
I ask myself, "What did I come in here for anyway…?"
Oh, tender angel of mercy, what were you doing that day on the Rolls Royce?
