Can you feel it?
Time is passing. Much more quickly than it did in the past. When you were a kid, the years were few and far between, big events that took what felt like a lifetime to get through. New Years Eve happened suddenly, out of nowhere it was another year, but that didn’t mean anything. Not to you. You just kept being basically the same size and having basically the same friends and the future was just a phrase. It wasn’t happening, it wasn’t coming. You just were. You existed in every moment.
Now the years are flying. They’re sprinting and jumping and rushing through the tunnel of my life like a subway. I used to ring in the New Year at my uncle’s Chinese restaurant, allowed for just one night to stay up unthinkably late. Now I get drunk (hopefully) somewhere fun (hopefully) with people I like, who also like me (hopefully) and if I’m really, extremely, ridiculously lucky, the person I love will be there too, and (hopefully) we can sleep together after. I can stay up as late as I want to, I can never sleep, but for some reason this doesn’t seem as important anymore. Everything you thought you would do as an adult turns out to be a myth of sorts.
Change is supposed to be good. It’s sexy to like change, it’s full of youth and god damn life to have the ability to embrace change and make it your friend. I have a hard time with change. I cling to things too much, things that at the time, I didn’t even like that much but now seem cosmically important. I am constantly dissatisfied with my present.
This is it. I’m at that age. You know. I just turned twenty. This is my peak. At least physically and socially and culturally. This culture is made for people my age. The fashion, the television, the food, the cities. Everything is targeted to young people. It didn’t used to be like this, there used to be a nobility to being older. Thirty and Forty year olds enjoyed running things, being the center of attention. I’m not quite sure when the change came, but slowly and surely things switched. Thirty is considered old now. The powers that be have decided for us when it’s acceptable to be cool, and it’s now.
I’m having a hard time coming to terms with it. With the idea that these are the best years of my life. Everything might be downhill from here. I’m going to continue to ingest too many fats and inhale too many chemicals and expose my skin to too many rays and it’s going to catch up with me. This is like the calm before the storm. I’m still relatively young now. My skin is still tight and my body still moves when I want it to and I’m still desirable. Eventually I’ll slow down and sag and halt and creak and be ignored. I feel like that time is coming too soon. The years aren’t as sporadic as they once were, they happen all the time now. I wake up and it’s a new month, I was asleep for the old one. I look behind me and realize that the seasons changed without me.
The future is more tangible now, and that’s scary. I’m here, it already happened. But it’s also still ahead of me. Closer then before. Right in front of my finger tips when I reach out. A couple more years and I’ll be there. Then. Now.
