#aging?

@redplaid-on-redplaid and I have a birthday coming up. It’s been almost a year since I’ve seen her - the longest we’ve spent apart in our entire lives.

But the last time we were together, we got these fantastic tattoos in celebration of reaching a milestone. 

And now, another birthday is coming up. The older you get, the more you are aware of the passage of time, it steals things from you, and, sure, the alternative is worse, better to experience the moments than have no moments at all.

But don’t you remember when you were six and waiting a year felt like an eternity. Or when you were 12 and just wanted to be 13 so you could start experiencing things that you read about in books? Or 18 and off to university - out to be an adult, but young enough that the decisions you made didn’t seem to matter - there’s always next year you’d tell yourself. Or 25 and hitting that quarter life crisis, where you actually realized that you were going to die - your life was finite, it, like everyone else’s, would reach an end at some point sooner or later, leaving that chasm of fear yawning in your chest at the unknown that follows. 

And now I’m almost 31 and I feel the time slipping through my fingertips, trickling away faster and faster despite clenching my hands tight to try to halt its flow. It’s a liminal age - too old to “still be figuring things out” (but I am), too old to “not be settled down” (but I’m not), too young to actually be my age (I still feel like I’m in my early twenties, making dumb mistakes, still trying to find my identity). But my body keeps telling me it’s ageing - joints ache, eyes get tired, sleep is hard to come by, cynicism is setting in. So, some days I mourn the years that are no more, the choices I’ll never get back, the mistakes I’ve made. On other days, I celebrate those years, the choices I did make, the mistakes that have taken me in a new direction.

Without those years, I would not exist - someone else would be wearing my skin, thinking my thoughts, living my life.

But time is still a thief. And it takes indiscriminately.

To me I know I’m somewhere in between 20 and 503 (504 in a couple days) and that’s enough for me.

It doesn’t count to much anyways. Almost everything that requires a specific age just requires 18.

The fact that I don’t drink, and will never trust myself to drive a car mean that I haven’t felt a reason to keep track of my age since I was. . . Idk. 16?

Back when people made a big deal out of how old you were.