NOTICE / Increasingly SO

Age is upon me! Lo, it does not stop but barrels down the hill at a speed I thought would be familiar but is instead cold and calculated like a sharp wind across an icy bridge. Out of nowhere it snaps your neck back and whips your hair across your cold sweating forehead and there is no stopping it. 

Is there comfort in knowing? Comfort that comes from feeling the relentless chill of death as a friend, or not a friend but more like a neighbor that will be around forever. The dripping of the faucet. Lo! It is death, and you cannot escape. Even hiding behind these quippy metaphors one cannot really disguise the feeling that yes, death is looming and now, no longer in my twenties, it all matters and doesn't at the same time. 

In my early twenties, late teens? I read a lot of Joan Didion. It was slightly before she was a *sad girl with cigarette* darling, but not quite. I think I felt that and liked it, because like most young women at that age, I felt out my intellect, but wanted it to be as safe and male-friendly as possible. I wanted to be smart, but mostly smart so that men found me interesting, mysterious, beautiful and aloof. 

Joan did write, does write, worthy text, despite that sort of hipster pantheon she has been ascribed to. One of the most striking things of hers I read was, "That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it." 

It knocked me off my chair, off my stool, off my feel like a heady swig of wine, like a soccer ball to the gut. Oh no! It does all matter, it will not all come true. I will die without doing things, I will die without becoming all of the versions of myself I have been harboring. I am incapable of some things, and there is nothing I can do about it. All the fantasies and fairy tales are over. The rug is rolled up in the closet and it will stay there. 

Now, at thirty, I drive closer to the edge. If it really doesn't matter, if there are things that will never happen, if I really am going to be attached to every stupid thing I ever did, then I better just push through the mendacity as much as possible. The mental image of this feeling is that of carefully saran-wrapped deep bowl. I pull all the edges tight and smush it all down so it is taught and air-tight. Then I push my finger into the middle, getting the saran-wrap stuck on my finger, creating a belly-button in the middle of my work, and then breaking it open and touching the leftovers underneath. 

To push through, I’ve been living almost manically recently. Extra wine! Stay up late! Spend the money! Leave work early! Perhaps an unravelling but also I’m realizing maybe it doesn’t all matter. Playing by the rules is just well, if nothing else, boring. To go to work, to sit at desk, eat sad lunch, go home, do again tomorrow until the weekend when we burn through our money to forget.