Irrelevancy and The Changing Tides

You do not care.

Once again, it is becoming summer, and the call of warm lazy days is fast approaching. I await it eagerly. And yet, as the seasons change so do I. I'm 16 now. I've gotten my first job. I start next month, and I'm terrified. It is nothing so vast and illimitable as a rift from my own humanity, nor so picayune as a dosage of social anxiety. No, this fear is something much, much greater. I'm really and truly changing. In two years time I will have graduated and I will be older than I was. In an hour's time I will be older than I am now. I am changing. I will never again have that lazy, hazy, days-bleed-together summer I was once so accustomed to, and I didn't know back then that it would be my last. I wish I had more time.

My body will begin to rot, soon. By the time I'm 25, I will have already started the decline into senescence, and there will be no predicting what will happen next. Even now, I'm unsure I'll make it to the peak of my body's physical life, or what that peak will look like. Hell, this right here could be as good as it gets. At 25, I should have a job, a living space, a method of transportation, a daily schedule, a budget for money, and a budget for time. There won't be any more days to spend sitting in my bed with my computer, slamming words together to watch the sparks fly. I might be writing my thoughts, right now, for the very last time.

There is always another last, always right around the corner. The last time my mother picked me up. The last time I saw my first friend. The last night I ever slept in my childhood home. Soon, it'll become the last time I saw my grandmother alive, the last step my father took on his own, the last book I read without bifocals. Already, I am dying. This is the human condition. This is the purpose of living: to die. To die slowly and painfully and to dread it but to die nonetheless. We are born dying. So why, if I have always been dying, is it so terrifying to me now?

I'll never be a child again. I'll never take my mother's hand and run to the neighborhood playground, forcing her to watch me dance and sing as I climb up on the squeaky wooden table. That park has been torn down. It was always a safety hazard. I saw my friend take her front teeth out on the monkey bars.

This reflection is so depressing, such a rambling spiral of anxieties and fear and nihilism, isn't it? What does it matter anyway? I've been dying since the second I was born, why should I care about it now? Why should I be afraid? I will always have my memories. I need to remember to enjoy making new ones, to leave some for myself in the future. I love you.