Wednesday, October 26, 2011

I am 21 now:

an old man, really. All that is left for me now are geriatrics and erectile dsyfunction. Or maybe not- I guess I'm not so old. Come to think of it, I am still very, very young. But I am getting old enough to understand that I will not always be young. My father told me yesterday that all of a sudden when he looks at me he sees a man and I'm not sure how I feel about that. Scared? A little bit, sure, but it's more than that. Nostalgic, nervous? Yes, those too. Excited? Absolutely.

I think about things a lot. Too much, probably. My brain is like some whirring motor that I can't shut off. I think about where I'm going to be in ten years and metaphoric paths that wind out of sight. I think about whether the two-week-long life of a fly seems as long to them as eighty or ninety years does to us since we are each only given two reference points-- birth and death-- and it is impossible to have perspective without a third. I think about my phone call the other day with a friend I grew up with and how he mentioned that his sister, who I still imagine as eight years old, is in highschool now. I think about me and him ourselves in highschool, drinking in parked cars and winning state championships, and I can swear it was just the other week.

It was late at night and clear and cold outside and I was lying on a park bench about to turn a year older when I tried to explain all this-- the way my mind runs and wrings and turns-- to a girl that smiles and giggles and laughs a lot. She thought about it and tried to smooth down a part of my hair she claimed was sticking up.

"I don't get what there is to worry about," she said. "All you can do is what you think you should do."

She furrowed her eyebrows for half a second; I waited.

"And if that doesn't work, well then, you do something else."

Click, like that the motor stops. The quiet is nice.