Chasing Myself

I'm not old.

I hope to be one day, but I suppose everyone does, in some way or another. Most people don't fantasize of wrinkles or denture cream or canes, practical shoes or non-slip bath mats. I can't say I've ever daydreamed about what retirement home any future family will put me in. I can only hope I make it that far.

But I am getting older. With each passing year I can feel life turning beneath my feet, pacing always parallel with my choices, and it's starting to scare me. I find myself frequently leaning back in my office chair to stare at the ceiling and wonder where I want my life to go. I stare at the ceiling, the bland, eggshell white sheen, the dust in the corner I'll never get to removing, the thin crack that makes me wonder what my upstairs neighbors were doing, and think. What do I want to do with my time here? What do I want to reminisce about if I am ever blessed one day with being old? I feel that old woman, that old self, peering back at me through the years, but I can't seem to read the look in her eyes. Did we make it, I want to shout, hoping the echoes make their way to her frail ears. I can't tell if she hears me.

But then I start to wonder: what if I'm being called to, as well? I'm so wrapped up in the now, in the potential of a future, that I forget to look to the past. These memories I can see more clearly. These I can touch, run a finger along, sift through with a vigor I hardly bring to anything else. I see myself as a child, scribbling furiously in the third notebook my first grade teacher provided me, desperate to get the story out thats been clawing at my insides for a week now. I feel the pink princess pencil beneath my small fingers. I sniffle at the eraser shavings that float too close to my nose. But I persevere, ignoring everything else that stands in the way of me and my story. Ignoring the future me that looks down at my work, remembering the cursed feeling of a story unwritten, and the blessed bliss of getting it all down on a page before it left me.

But here, she looks up. Does she see me? I look into my own eyes, brown and watery and filled with a light that I all too quickly snuffed out, and know that she does. Did we make it, she asks me, fingers clamped so tightly on that pencil that they turn white. I do not answer. I don't think I know how.

I turn time back to myself, back to my body that no longer feels too little to accomplish anything, nor too old to move forward. I find myself, freshly slipping into another January, the bite of a new year nipping at my heels, and ponder the question: Did I make it? Will I make it?

And for once, I know the answer: yes.

I know, because today I sat down to write, tomorrow I will sit down to write, twenty years ago I sat down to write, fifty years from now I will sit down to write, a week from now I will sit down to write, and I will know I have made something. I wrote, I write, I have written.

And 2024 will be no different. I am old, but I am also young, and I am as I am right now. And all of me is a writer.