I am 57 years old cleaning out my closet. I am 35 years old and my wedding shoes are giving me blisters. I am 20 years old crying at the wake. I am 15 years old reading a book I’ll forget in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility. I am 6 years old and I cannot be kind to my classmate. I am less than 2 years old when I become a sister. I have not been born yet and none of this has happened.
I almost cried the other day while I was at the local pool with my brother. As part of a fundraiser for his swim team, I participated in a family and friends relay event, bringing me back to a place I hadn’t been in years. There were lots of young kids there, with siblings, friends, and parents, which felt weird to me because I was no longer the young kid on the swim team I had once been. The moment that almost brought me to tears is when a mom stopped her son and one of his friends to take a picture of them before they swam their relay. So the mother snapped the picture and the boys continued to play. My throat tightened and my eyes felt uncomfortably full.
What will happen has happened.
I find the inevitability of passing time to be a wasteful yet constant preoccupation for me. I also find it to be one of the most universal anxieties in both the people I know and do not know. Perhaps it does not always hit with the full weight of existential dread, sometimes it feels more like a slight pressure at the center of my forehead when I think about how old my siblings are now. Or it's the brief disappointment when I bring a mug to my mouth, assuming I have one more sip of coffee left, only to have found that I finished it a few minutes ago. Or it’s the nauseating memory that there are people I love who I will never see again for one reason or another.
The last page you read of a book. The last chord that strums in a song. The last scene of the movie. The delusion that repeating these actions will bring you back to that same feeling, that same moment - that it does not have to be over yet.
I explained to a friend once that the best I ever feel is when I watch videos of people analyzing aspects of video games I played growing up. I would watch the same videos over and over, maintaining the same level of interest that I had the first time I saw them. I remember explaining that the comfort I derived from this experience came from the paralyzation of the moment - nothing in my life was happening, nothing felt like it was going to happen, and nothing seemed like it had happened. All I had was the comforting words about a game I knew well on repeat in my headphones while I stayed tucked under my blankets, frozen in the content of a life free of motion.
I could constantly repeat a moment I knew well and enjoyed. I had the scripts memorized and knew the scenes that would play on the screen. I rarely change my pajamas when I am home and do not have much to do, therefore I could perfectly embody the original moment over and over.
Of course, that is no way to live life. However, the expectations for how we are supposed to live life often filled me with the kind of dread that forced me to retreat under my covers. I found this dread isolating because I could not put into words what exactly I was afraid of. It was like being on edge for a war only I had heard news of - while everyone else was living their lives I was stocking up a bomb shelter that I would never need but always found use for.
With the help of medication and therapy I have been able to overcome this dread in the basic sense that I do live my life in a way that meets basic expectations. I still find myself struck by moments like the one at the pool, though, where I cannot avoid the fact that each moment I experience reaches an end that I may or may not approve of. It’s the reason I rarely throw out clothes I do not wear anymore, shoes that do not fit, the reason I can only sleep with a blanket I have had since childhood.
There’s this urge to turn this anxiety into something poetic. I could describe my habits in fantastical terms, as though the blanket that I sleep with is a symbolic representation of who I once was, and its mangled appearance serves as a reminder that she no longer exists but my compulsive need to hold it tight speaks to my inability to bury what is gone. The inability to accept that what was going to happen has already happened, that I am constantly drinking from an empty glass and trying to deny that I am constantly dehydrated from it.
I began writing in my imagination. I am 20 years old, only half of what I said was true, though maybe one day the rest of it will be true. And everything that I listed that was true has permanently happened, and I cannot change any aspect of it.
I still sleep with my blanket from childhood. I am wearing the same pair of shorts that I wore the other day. I am listening to a song I have heard dozens of times. But there is so much that has happened, so much that is permanent in its end.
It is not bad, per say, I’m just still growing into it all.
Lesssss chilll oooops i mean hangg out elohel actually would really love to have a open convo w u