Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

“Is the future knowable? Will our older selves be anything like our younger selves thought we would be? We can only find out by writing it down and then putting it out of our minds and letting life take its course. The unraveling of time should be mysterious, don’t you think?”

Marriage, at first, felt like a really long, sex-filled date. Of course, it was much more than that. They had to learn how to cohabitate. They had to learn how to make space for each other in ways that had nothing to do with their bodies.

Time was like a rock bed with a lot of layers, she said, then took a moment to find the word she wanted: strata. Even the most unbearable things became fossils, after a while.

‘That’s because I’m trying to squeeze the stupid out of you, honey!’ ” She waved that away. “It doesn’t work, but you’ll feel better.”

The world will always bring you back into perspective, if you only bother to let it.

The wisdom that comes with age was needling, he found, because it brought the clarity of hindsight without the means to change anything.

Wasn’t it a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes? How they managed to stumble into some of the right steps, after taking all the wrong ones?

This is why old people seem distant and distracted, he thought. We aren’t living in the past; the past is living in us. And it’s talking. We get old to be able to recalibrate everything we thought was going to be important. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.