The Good Part

by Sophie Cousens

“Be careful what you wish for,” the old woman says, and I look up to see her watching me from her seat behind the till. “Life is never quite sorted, whatever stage you’re at.”

A youthful body, where everything looks fine without trying, is something I realize I took for granted. I’ve never done regular workouts, or eaten particularly healthily, but in my twenty-six-year-old body, I could always jump out of bed, even with a hangover. My face looked fresh enough without makeup and my muscles all worked exactly how I needed them to. Now when I wake up, it’s not pain exactly, but there’s a feeling of needing to “get myself going.” There’s a stiffness in my back; my brain takes a minute to fully engage with the day.

‘You have to get up and face the day, because every day is a gift, and you can’t let Tom Hoskyns or anyone else steal a single one from you.’

“Well, we can only try our best,” I say, then realize I’ve just used a phrase my dad often said to me. Do these phrases sit dormant in our minds, just waiting to be deployed when we become parents ourselves?

“You know what I’ve always loved about gardening?” he asks, and I shake my head. “Plants don’t mind who you are, what you’ve done, or what you’ve forgotten. If you visit them frequently and look at them properly, you’ll sense what they need. People are the same—you don’t need to know someone’s entire history to know when they need a hug.” Then he pulls me into his arms.

“But”—Alex holds up a hand, she hasn’t finished—“maybe bones need to be broken for you to suck out the marrow of life. We are lucky, we are here, when others are not. I wear the gray in my hair as a badge of honor, the privilege of aging.”

Is that what life is—missing out in your twenties because you have no money, then missing out in your forties because you have no time?