Growing Pains

We all grow old and die. If there's one constant to life, it's that. As Nabokov remarks in Speak, Memory, "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

I get it. I'm not long for this earth. Lying awake in bed at night, I add numbers silently in my head. In ten years I'll be 28, in 50 I'll be 68... I think about morbid things like my mom getting older, shorter, dwindling away into a shade of her iron self until all's left is rust and bare earth. When will she die I wonder? I figure that's when I'll know it, that I'm old, when mom's not around to boss me around (unsuccessfully I might add), when she's dead and in the ground, her bones the salt of this earth.

What will it feel like to be old? I have no conception of anything but youth so unfettered and easy. I trust the solidity of my body, the tumult of my disposition, the precocious childishness of a life yet untamed. It endures then perhaps, this palpitating energy that animates my limbs, that allows me to slip so easily from my high bed each morning, to repeat my diurnal routine anew.The eternal summer of my life waxes golden even in this darkest of Tennessee winters.

But in time, things will change. I know this, deep inside I do. The mind may age slower than the body, as it is more dexterous than mortal sinew and bone, but it will go in time as well, as all things tend to do. Indeed, things area already changing. Just one semester of college, and already my friends are dispersing, the intersecting spheres of our lives pared down to shiny little slivers. Our individual selves need more space it seems. We're eighteen you know, adults in the eyes of the law.

Yet sometimes I'm not sure if I've made that transition yet, or if any of us truly have. Can the tipping of a number really displace childhood with such belligerent efficiency, does eighteen really make me as much an adult as Mrs. Johnson or mother or the handsome older man who's mustang got stuck in our icy driveway this morning? Now of course they have the accumulated experience of age on me, but was there a point where adulthood became the relevant label of their lives? In other words, when and how did they grow up and suddenly become adults?

There are some who would say it doesn't happen like that, some who would claim that the adults are just as clueless as the kids. We're all screwed up people in a closed system of a world, just trying to scrape by on the resources allotted to us. But I think I'm of the opposite mind. I think there's a difference, a small one, but it's there. It's not that I think adulthood enlightens the self; no, I'm positive there are adults out there who are more ignorant about the world than I. I just know... no feel that sometime betwixt 20 and 30 a shift occurs in the makeup of ones life. Things add up: kids, taxes, spouses, etc. But it's more than that. It's the years flying by, the rapidly looming immediacy of the unknown--that being death. So control is needed, measures must be taken, to organize life into something readable, something palatable, so that when the day comes, you can have a tidy death at least.

Childhood then is all about the disorder of it all. It's about messy, beautiful things, about mudpies and bruised blades of grass and the heady scent of sweaty, unkempt sheets. So when does it end is my question. How will I know when I'm no longer a kid anymore? When will it feel okay to refer to myself internally as a man rather than as a boy?

I think I'm beginning to see, the adult within I mean. Today, walking with Ellen by Turkey Creek, our footprints mingling in the plush snow, I started to think aloud for both my friend's benefit and my own. I asked her where we she thought we were going, what was changing, who we were becoming. We agreed that it was over, it being high school and endless summers spent poolside and the sense of having a definite home in this world, but we weren't quite sure about the path from here. Stopping at a bridge over the wide creek bed, we could hear the distant murmur of the rapids in the creek where the black, cold water frothed and churned in the velvet indigo beyond where our night vision halted and a frozen unknown hinterland began. But over that we could hear the rush of cars on the interstate, the people racing towards Nashville or downtown Knoxville to their homes where their neat little lives would be waiting. And here we were, together but still alone, looking out at the bare bones of a forest that once spread great and proud... now sparse enough that you could see the lights of the Walmart where we had parked a few hundred meters away.

Molding the powdery snow into globular projectiles, we took aim at a lonely tree that protruded from the inky heart of the creek, denuded of branches. We threw until Ellen finally hit it, dead center, hard enough to knock the stubborn snow from its upper reaches where the trunk curved into a convenient nook to catch the snowfall. Such a child's game it seemed, but I didn't feel childish anymore. In that moment I was an anachronism, a fatal flaw in what would've been an idyllic tableau of youth if it had happened just a few years ago. I am not an adult, but I am not a child either. I can not turn the memory of tonight, the strange delight of I derived from standing with Ellen on the bridge, into another sepia tinted memory of youth. It doesn't have the same feel anymore. My awareness has changed, expanded, surrendered to the vastness of the world the special isolation of childhood, the feeling of being an island of the self.

Our game finished, we walked on, but I don't remember what else we talked about. It was light stuff I'm sure, boyfriend dramas and friendly banter of that sort. The moment had passed; the flames of our brazen young lives had flickered for a moment and then held. We were still young. But no longer were we invincible.