Eventually,
We all get older.
We wake up and find ourselves standing on the precipice of adult.
We brace our bodies for the shift that’s sure to come,
The jump, the free fall,
The swan dive into the gatekept world of grown ups,
Where we’ve been barred out for long enough.
Countless hours spent building up dreamscapes
of getting out
And growing up
And getting rich
Or famous
Or beautiful.
Or brilliant.
We go reckless and proud and headfirst into ice cream for dinner
And socks that exist only in pairs
And questionable bedtimes
And bad decisions
And for the briefest and sweetest of moments we think,
By golly, I’ve made it.
Eventually,
We all get older.
The evidence of our ice cream dinners shows up on our hips
and thighs,
Our bodies betray our most private moments,
Shouting out to any passerby,
“I’ve had six pints of ben and jerry’s just this week!
I haven’t used my gym membership in well over a year
and at this point, i’m afraid to go in to cancel it!”
And, seriously, what is up with the sock thing?
Does my dryer consume socks?
Like, if my dryer doesn’t maintain a steady diet of socks,
Will it starve?
Will it explode?
Will it go on strike and recruit my washer to join in the fighting of the good fight?
Who do I call when my laundry appliances spin cycle their way into civil unrest?
A sacrificial sock here and there is better than the alternative,
I suppose,
Because I sure as **** can’t afford a new appliance,
let alone two,
And also, at what point do i start to feel like I can comfortably afford a new appliance?
Is it when I stop throwing money at a gym membership that i haven’t used in like, twelve-plus months,
or does that come some other time?
And why is it that anymore, by 9:30 every night,
My body starts to feel its own weight
all at once,
It’s as if I couldn’t remain upright if my life depended on it.
Is that because, for the last fifteen months, I have poured my hard-earned dollars into a gym membership that I have used
not one time in,
coincidentally,
the last fifteen months?
Like, all jokes aside,
why would we,
As an ever-evolving, self-aware, species
Continue to dish out nearly twenty U.S. dollars a month
Fifteen separate times
For a gym membership that we are obviously
Never going to use again?
And just like that,
It is so
Clear.
You have no ******* idea what you are doing.
Eventually,
We all get older.
We come to accept that more often than not,
Days will be bookended by more questions than answers.
If we’re lucky,
We might find ourselves learning to lean into the gray spaces,
the precariousness of it all,
Instead of trying to stain it peachy.
To find a quiet corner in the static,
To let the strangeness that be wrap itself around you,
Is a feeling that I suspect only an elite few ever get really good at.
To those of us who still try,
To those of you who are still trying,
Take pride in the practice.
No one gets good at being comfortable in the gray on their first try.
For some, it takes a lifetime.
For others, lifetimes.
But from what i’ve been told,
It’s well worth the waiting for.
Eventually,
We all get older.
Yes, even the mamaws and the willow trees
and the baby brothers
the first grade teachers, too,
and the cicada who met your acquaintance that one summer afternoon all those years ago.
The dads, the best dogs, the single moms,
Yup, they all get older, too, eventually.
As we all do.
When they go,
(we all go, you know, eventually)
we remember them for their windchime giggles
or you find them in the way you still brush your hair,
Just how they taught you.
People tend to leave breadcrumbs of themselves all over the place.
If you pay enough attention,
You can find them **** near anywhere.
You have your mother’s eyes, for example,
Or so you’ve been told,
A hereditary heirloom from her to you.
Even if you never could quite see the resemblance.
but lately, you’ve noticed,
There is a familiar sort of something there,
In your own lookalike set,
You can just barely, almost, make it out
When you tie your hair back and tilt your head just so.
It comes most clearly in the mirror after the kind of day
you don’t want to talk about.
When being has broken you down,
There’s a skepticism,
or a longing maybe.
You’ve seen this somewhere before, have you not?
A daydream perhaps?
A long-forgotten dandelion wish
or a memory dislodged?
You’re still working out the logistics, the linguistics of it,
But you saw this, once upon a time,
Took note of it,
Came to know it well, you think,
Certainly it must have existed in your mother’s eyes,
must’ve because,
It’s a familiar sort of something.
You first remember it way back when,
Yes, that’s it,
Something from way back
when all you wanted to know was what it meant to be her,
To be big,
To be grown up.
Peculiar, though, isn’t it?
it seems such a juvenile sort of something now,
Looking at it from way up here,
Seeing it in your own reflection for the first time,
Does it not?
Big, grown.
An adolescent sort of uncertainty, possibly,
Or -- no, that’s not quite it,
Childlike wonder, it must be,
In her eyes and yours.
Proof, I suppose,
That eventually,
we all get older.
And maybe it’s presumptuous to assume,
But one can’t help but wonder,
Aren’t we all just grown up kids?
Aren’t we all making it up as we go
and filling in the gaps with the cadence of a child,
Your mother must’ve, too, i’d guess,
with that sort of something in her eyes.
Aren’t we all stumbling, scrambling, doing our best to scrape by,
Praying to the dryer gods that our **** doesn’t break,
And if it does,
We cross our fingers for the tragic death of an imaginary, estranged, great-uncle who just so happens to have acquired a hefty sum of money throughout his life and, well,
i’ll be ******,
If he didn’t make you his beneficiary! Stranger things have happened here, have they not?
Aren’t we all just trying to understand?
ourselves?
and people?
and god and grief and bliss and sickness and marriage and death, hope and money, how the defrost works, and what it is about karma that makes her such a ***** and what it means to be a good person, anyways, and taxes and laundry and which drugs are must-trys and which are don’t-evers and when drinking is considered to be a “problem” and how people can push THAT out of THERE and the art of loving and the arguably more advanced art of being loved and forgiveness and success and desire and *** and stick shifts and the beauty of a deep breath?
Aren’t we all lost out here?
Aren’t we all scared out of our minds?
A bunch of grown up kids, really.
A ragtag group of misfits, try-hards, have-beens, and never-weres.
Eventually,
We all get older
Except those of us who don’t, I suppose.
I’d venture that we’re all still trying to figure out how to understand that, too.
We get older, just the same, as one does,
our hips get wider and our dryers get nicer, newer.
Teenage girls seem to get ever-prettier, the rich get richer,
cruelty gets more cunning and the planet gets sicker.
We get far more than we bargained for or
Far less than we deserve,
We get busy living and dying in tangent,
love gets stronger, scarier,
and we keep the faith that some day,
Somehow, love will get simpler, sweeter,
and time, as it does, gets on with itself,
despite it all.
In spite of it all.
And, as we do, we get older.
And still,
we have no ******* clue what we are doing.
If we’re being really honest here,
We understand not one ******* thing about whatever this is,
And I’m not fully convinced that we even want to know.
So, we let ourselves be small in big bodies.
We eat ice cream for dinner to remind our little selves that there is joy in the forbidden, the unpredictable, and the delicious.
We approach socks with reckless abandon,
pair a tall christmas
With a no-show pineapple-speckled grey,
We take on every decision with the impulsivity of a tiny human who,
Roughly and at best,
Has six years of life experience under their belt,
Skipped their afternoon nap,
and has developed an apparent affinity for shotty judgement calls,
We’ll apologize for it later.
And it’s true of most of us,
I’d think,
That we hope for a day somewhere down the line,
when we’re a little older,
A little wiser,
A little bit in a position in which we can comfortably afford a new dryer should we need to,
We wait for the day when we’ll wake up, as normal a morning as any,
And it’ll hit us:
By golly, i’ve made it.
The truth, i think, is that so few ever actually do.
Make it, I mean,
Whatever that is for you.
We hang on to our hope and convince ourselves we’re satisfied,
Or that we’re better off now than when we started.
Maybe we are.
But if you ask me?
I don’t think it matters.
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at my mom’s eyes in my own reflection.
I’ve asked all the questions,
Looked hard for a clue or a compass to point me to
Where i’m supposed to be going,
What it all means,
Who to trust
What to expect out of a person,
What people expect out of me,
Where to go to find lost souls,
Where I fit into the grand scheme,
And like, what even is this whole “grand scheme” thing anyways?
All this to say,
I don’t think she knows any better than I do anyhow.
Or than her mom before her.
Grown up kids, you know?
Little people in big bodies.
Every last one of us.
Growing up
And getting older
and getting the **** out of dodge
before we have a chance to catch up with ourselves.
I think it's the best way, truth be told.
But who’s to say, really?
I, for one,
Have no ******* idea what i am doing,
And if I was the gambling kind,
I’d bet my bottom dollar that you don’t have a ******* clue,
either.
We’re all just figuring it out, aren’t we?
Grown up kids, that’s all.
Little people in big bodies,
Just making it up as we go.
a.m.
