So I’m thirty-one now. What is there to say about that?
You might have noticed that time speeding up has been a
recent theme of mine. And I swear, last year’s birthday was just a little while
ago. I wrote a tribute to my twenties. We had a party. This year we didn’t,
which was just as well: it didn’t feel like much of an occasion. Today is the
anniversary of the day I was born? Great, fantastic. Then I blink and it’s a
week later. One of my cousins mentioned telling her students why she didn’t want
to celebrate her birthdays either: they were growing up, while she was just
getting older. That’s pretty relatable if you ask me.
I always used to look forwards in life. The past only
interested me in terms of lessons gleaned from bittersweet memories. It was
something to get away from. Now, though, I have this nagging feeling that I’ve
lost some innate piece of myself along the way and don’t know how to get it
back. I used to read every book on the shelf and dream of being a fantasy
author. Now I barely read or write at all anymore. Well, I barely read books;
I spend plenty of time on the internet following the news and video game
reviews and so on. But that’s a subject for another post.
It’s going on two years now since my mom died. Our lives
together weren’t the best. There were so many times that I wish I’d had more
empathy or been a better son. But we had some good times too, after the chemo
did its poisonous work and cleared the cancer out of her system for a reprieve.
We went out for pizza every month for years before that, long before the first tumour
began to grow. Those were the good old days. If only I hadn’t taken them for
granted.
I’ve been working at the same place for over nine years now,
and I’ve seen it slowly decline over time. Vehicles wore out and could no
longer be repaired. More and more people retired. Sections were closed off,
damaged by landslides, reclaimed by nature. There was a gentle old uncle I used
to take the bus with; he died in his early fifties before even reaching
retirement. People I knew have had strokes, heart problems, kidney failure.
Someone who’d been a little girl when I first joined grew up and had cancer in
her teens. She passed away last year.
Entropy is the natural order of the universe, as they say. Change
is the only constant.
I’ve been at the same place for nine years, but maybe 2022 will
be the last. On Monday I start working somewhere else; temporarily, perhaps. Or
maybe this will be the start of something new. I don’t know, and that bothers
me, the not knowing. It’s at times like these that I feel unsettled, unsure,
lacking in some vague and insidious way. There are things I should have done,
that I should have more experience with, at age thirty-one. What does it mean
that I don’t? Does it make me less of a person? There’s plenty more life to
live, and yet I don’t feel like I’m growing up anymore. I’m just getting older.
I’m thirty-one years old, and if I live as long as my mom,
that puts me squarely at the halfway point. Other people my age have gotten
married, had kids, built stable careers, travelled to far-off places. What have
I done, exactly? Written half-finished novels before losing interest? Carried
pythons and handfed hornbills? Memorized animal facts, acted like a frightened
tourist, gotten comfortable talking to strangers? I’ve got a lot of stories, to
be sure. That just doesn’t feel like enough.
When I was a kid, the land our house sits on now was all
paddy fields. My grandparents worked in them before I was born. Then the times changed,
and the land was filled in for our different family members’ houses to be
built. There are kids running around here now who’ve never known anything
different, my nieces and nephew shooting up like weeds. Someday they’ll grow up
and find that the world has changed for them as well. I wonder where I’ll be in
life by then.
I don’t have a tidy lesson or ending to all this, because,
well, there isn’t one. Life keeps moving on until it doesn’t, until an ending
which is rarely painless or peaceful in any sense of the word. Normally I’d try
to make this into some kind of inspirational bullshit like not thinking the
neighbour’s grass is greener when they probably feel the same way about yours. Not
today though.
Perhaps this is the human condition; to be constantly
dissatisfied, uncertain, wanting just that little bit more out of life. To feel
adrift in the ennui of it all. Perhaps tomorrow will be better, or it might be
worse than today. We never know, do we.
All things change eventually.
