R. Leib's Blog: Dream State - Posts Tagged "old"

It is layered like a planet. The inner core is the person I feel I have always been. Memories of early childhood are faint now, so it is the persona that developed during my teen years that seems to be the essential me. With each year, I expected to feel older, wiser, more sophisticated, in some ways a different person, but there is still that teenage boy in there. Sure, my body is weaker. I heal much slower. My hair is a patchwork of gray and white. My hearing and sight are frustratingly impaired. My vocabulary has increased and then declined. I have committed to memory and have forgotten whole encyclopedias of facts and ideas. Experiences have layered themselves upon me in scars and regrets forming a mantle of complexity. All this is covered with the crust of manners that other people see. But these are all strata over the child that still dreams and empathizes and finds puns amusing.

It is my birthday tomorrow. I am reticent to tell you how old I am, but suffice to say that I feel old. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to accept that, at best, less than half of the stories rumbling around in my head will be written before I'm gone. I guess I am feeling my mortality this evening. I always knew I would die, but the idea was a nebulous one until a few years ago. Then it struck me how many paths I had started that would go no further in my lifetime. The older I get, the more I feel like a snail racing against a clock that might as well be calendar. Oh well. Back to writing. Cake will have to wait for tomorrow.

The one good thing about being old is that scarred for life isn't that big a deal.