A Conversation With Me

“The thing is, no one ever really grows up. We play a part, face the world, act serious, but inside, we’re all seventeen, waiting for everything to make sense.” He said with a shake of his head.

“There’s something intensely heartbreaking being a real person being in front of another real person, and then both of you feel the need to act like fake people. You talk to someone ten years older than you in passing and you both say ‘Hello, there’, smile at irrelevant things and say ‘Yes, the weather is how it is’ and ‘Absolutely, the 405 is a nightmare, isn’t it’ and other obvious trivialities.

“All the while you know you’d both laugh at poop jokes and fart sounds and you have all these beautiful interests and desires and you curse more often that you’d like to admit. You’re authentic. But interactions become rote. You put on the face, they put on the face, and you never get to see the depth and entirety of someone who is just as authentic as you. Their hurt, pain, joy, love, and fear stays contained within a deep dark place that you both never try to air out, share, or relate to.

“Is that why life is so difficult?”

“Perhaps, but the real frustration lies in the retrospective entirety of it all,” and he sighs, “it catches you completely by surprise. It’s when you have a brief pause and you remember a day. Any day. A simple conversation in high school. An old lover. A friend of a friend. Something that happened long enough ago that enough time has passed that it seems even foreign to you, like you were watching the movie of someone else’s story. It tends to sneak up on you, and you begin to ask yourself, when did I become so old?”

“But I remember some of my younger years like it was yesterday. I remember my girlfriends and my friends and they used to travel and drink and laugh and talk about sex and love and now they all are almost entirely unreachable, in their own lives, segmented, compartmentalized. I see sound bites, snapshots, the things they want to share. And I do that too; and I like all of that. But I can’t go back and have another laugh, another beer, another hug, another kiss, another conversation.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem is I’m still seventeen years old. I feel like I did in my twenties. My ambitions are lofty, my eyes wide. My life is still happening every moment as it always has. But now, my needs and wants have changed, and my body has changed, and my mind has changed, in a way, but I didn’t change. I’m still putting on a face. So when these thoughts sneak up on me — a flash of a hazy morning in a stranger’s bed, a memory of a late night date, a roadtrip, or the feeling of falling asleep with my arms around someone I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with… it breaks me. It breaks me because I can’t think of it fondly. I don’t look at that kid all starry eyed with nostalgia, I look at him with jealousy, even envy. Envy, because he’s got that ahead of him still, and he can’t even know how lucky he is. He’s me, we are the same — but he’s got the good looks and the health and all the years ahead of him, and I’m wasting away. And I hate that kid so much. Every time he sneaks into my periphery I hate him more.”

“What about family? Children?”

“Of course they’re amazing. But they go away. They’re not you. In the end, you raise your sons and daughters for the world, not for yourself. They have to live it all, have their own experiences, their own lives, their own heartbreaks and elations. They don’t exist for my benefit. No one exists for that but my own self.

I swallowed dry, and averted my wet eyes. He leaned forward in a conspiratorial fashion. “We always get that insane, illogical idea the good old days are either behind us or ahead of us. They’re never actually our own days. We feel that we missed out, we didn’t do enough, get enough, feel enough. But the truth is, it was all happening all around us as we grew. Our new and exciting world was some curmudgeon’s boring present, and our past will be some arrogant kid’s good ol’ days. We were just too ungrounded to realize it when it mattered. So they came and went. And then we ended up like me — sad, resentful of our younger selves for all they can still do and we no longer can.

I leaned in, matching his tone. “I understand, and I’m sorry. I just wanted to meet you, I wanted to know how it would be.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I knew you would. After all, I did it, sixty years ago. It’s why I have no regrets, and in some way, I will find peace, even though I envy you more than you could ever know.”

I looked at man, he had my eyes, they were distinctly recognizable despite the wrinkles around them, they looked like they did in the mirror every day. He shook his head, visibly blinked the tears away.

I awkwardly hugged my own eighty year old version and leaned away and nodded. “I’ll never forget this dream, and I’m so glad I met you — you’re right, I am living the good old days.”

He got up with difficulty. “You will forget,” he said. “It’s the nature of being. You see, those good old days are only ever good when they’ve passed. That’s what makes them good. When you’re living them, they’re just what they are — days.”

As the dream dissolved he walked away, fading into nothingness. As he dissolved, he spoke without turning his head: “keep in mind those days go by really fast, my friend. Really fast.”