What we call growing up is a series of blessings. Hands that bathe & clothe us, voices that soothe & serenade us.

Friends pass in & out, not knowing what they might meant to us or to one another. Some of them take root. Family members in far flung places confuse us — names almost like yours, faces like some funhouse mirror version of your parents’, houses & habits curious enough to make you wonder how this is their normal. And the quiet discovery that blood deep though you may be with one another, you are as foreign & perverse to them as they are to you. If they think about you at all, which they rarely do.

There’s a shift that nobody prepares you for: when you stop talking about growing up and move to talking about growing old. You recognize with some surprise (maybe even alarm) that you’re no longer the youngest person in the room. You pass mannequins & wrinkle your nose at what passes for handsome, what passes for stylish. Things are passing you by, and the passing stings.

What do we call this time? Middle age … if we have children, perhaps; if we have older parents, definitely. Maturity … almost never. That word, a sucker punch targeting the young, a word to criticize their carefree here & now for being carefree, for focusing on here only, now only, for reminding us of our worry-riddled everyday.

What is this self that we have become, and where are its blessings?

[to be continued]

[Inspired by Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Like A Sky Inside]