If you’re wondering about aging, here’s some stuff I’ve noticed lately.
I feel more approximate. In most every respect, I’m messier with my motor control and my emotional awareness and my ability to pinpoint what the hell I’m so upset about most of the time. I don’t chew as carefully. I’m in a hurry for no particular reason. I overlook things like mild consistent nausea and itchy eyes because I’m sick of hearing myself complain about them, or things like them.
That’s another thing: most things are like something else. Most people remind you of someone else. You’ve met some version of them and their heartbreak story before. But you can’t say that, because it sounds pompous and out of touch.
But you stay a little out of touch purposely, because you’re tired of being touched in the exact same grooves again and again. So you approximate the emotion, the observation, the friendship, because in most cases it will pass, and you can save your energy for that one niggling problem at the edge of your mind, on the tip of your tongue, that is just out of your reach, that is quietly driving you to madness.
Maybe it’s the thing not done. Maybe it’s the inverse view that shows you’ve done it all ass-backward but it’s too late to fix. Or maybe it’s the silent waiting of nothing. The dark presence of absolute nothingness, rendering your failures as irrelevant as your successes, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing. Some laughs and some tears and some paint colors and bankruptcies and music and cough drops and junk drawers and all of it is just space and time. You’d better enjoy that ice cream cone because there is nothing else. How do you measure the pleasure of an ice cream cone? How do you enjoy it when you keep forgetting the meaning of the word enjoy? It sounds like a perfume or a mini cupcake bakery. Approximation is easier, loosely managing to make a cup of coffee, hoping I don’t drop it because I forgot to remember to hold on.