I went down to the basement to clean up the wreckage of Laney's last playdate when I decided to confront this box full of papers that I'd been studiously ignoring for the past couple of weeks. I'd figured it was full of some boring financial papers, ancient bank statements or long defunct insurance policies. But it wasn't. It was mine. It was a box full of all my writings from the 90s: fiction, journalism, academic. There were bar reviews and columns I'd written for Barfly and the boring town hall meetings I'd covered for The Daily Southtown. There were deep, dense papers I'd written in grad school. And I just fell into that box.
And, oh, I miss that girl.
There's something about sitting here on this cusp of 40. It looms and threatens. This knowledge that I am in the middle of my life, and while much is ahead, there's a whole lot behind. There's a whole lot that is unrecoverable and distant. And it's sad. I'm mourning that carefree kid who had such fun chewing on literary theory and deconstructing bar traffic back in those carefree 90s. I mourn her. I mourn her even though I'd never trade being this woman who sits alone at my computer at night, listening to the rain on the roof, secure in the knowledge that my child is safe and happy, that my husband loves me and is my partner in this whole, scary, enormous project that is life. But I mourn her nonetheless.
I suppose 40 is like most things: the anticipation is a lot more intense than the actual. I reckon I'll be ruminating on this for a few months and then it will be over and I'll say "This wasn't so bad, this turning 40." And yet (Hi, Dave!), I think that to love being alive is inextricably intertwined with being really sad that it passes so quickly. And, you guys, I really love being alive.
Oh, shit, let's just leave it up to the professionals (read it aloud. I'm not telling you again: you read poetry aloud):
In the Middle
Barbar Crooker
of a life that's as complicated as everyone else's,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather's
has stopped at 9:20; we haven't had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don't ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning's quick coffee
and evening's slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We'll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.
