I am getting older.
It came to my attention when I lay in bed one night, shifting left and right in a futile attempt at sleep. The weather was unbearably hot, the kind that seeps in through your window, dampening any semblance of cold in a dense, humid cloak. It was a night wherein everything seemed hopelessly unbearable; this room is too messy, my back is aching, this blanket is too thick, I have school in 7 hours. This constant train of thought chugged in lazy circles through my room, its steam rising to dance upon the ceiling and making me choke and gag on its cloudy dullness. So I did what any person would do when they had trouble sleeping—I opened my phone, and I searched for music to play.
That was when I saw it—a lofi rendition of the Gravity Falls theme. A throwaway thought floated by softly, as though lifted by a cloud. Ha, I remember this. I remember watching this show when I was young... And then, the novel concept sank into my bones: when I was young? I’m still young—I am only 20.
Yet, it is a universal experience—anyone with the capacity to remember experiences nostalgia, just in different ways. As a 3-year-old child clings to the baby blanket they received when they were 2 months old; how an 18-year-old thinks fondly of an old video game they played when they were 10; in a 50-year-old finding an old figurine, only to look back and laugh at memories of watching Mazinger Z. There is no set age to be capable of feeling this visceral emotion we cannot quite put into words: is it a hopeful remembrance of better times? A sad longing for memories we cannot fully retrace, the lines of the sketch of a beautiful moment in time blurred by time’s unabashed fingers? We cannot fully tell what it is, only that it hurts and heals, binds our heart in a squeezing embrace, and makes us think this same old thought: I am getting older.
It is the sad truth that time weathers us. I remember being 14, laughing as I poked at my dad’s cast. He had dislocated a bone from a swimming injury. I asked him, “Why do you get injured so easily? You just went for a swim.”
He answered with a shrug: “I’m too old to do those things anymore, but that’s fine. It’s alright to grow old.”
I laughed, and called him an old man. In the future, I would tease him about retirement homes, and how he shouldn’t be watching ‘childish things’, like Star Wars and cartoons. He always said the same thing, “It’s natural to age.” I’d respond with a frown, and say I wish I would never have to grow up.
When I was a child, I would never think that I would end up facing the same ills as my father. Getting my first back pains from hunching over a seat at 13; crying from school as it transformed from sitting in a kindergarten classroom, playing with dolls and plush toys, into imaginary numbers and argumentative essays; gradually becoming frail as my weak health caught up to me: COVID at 19 weakening my heart, such that I cannot even walk up a flight of stairs at half the speed I did when I was 11.
I, as all children do, took things for granted. I did not think that little things, things I called childish, were treasures that should be kept and cherished. Knowing the tune of Chowder by heart, re-enacting Tom and Jerry, drinking Milo by the cans with my friends as we laid back, swinging our legs over the jade-green stairs at my secondary school—all these little memories had calcified into the backbone of my childhood.
As a teenager, I had thrown out many of my childhood things. Big girls don’t play with toys. I’m an adult, so I don’t need childish things around me. It had never occurred to me that the labeling of innocent tidings and fun to be ‘childish’, was childish in itself. My fortunate childhood gave me many lessons that I would periodically unearth, a flint to my steel to spark much-needed hope. It was alright for me, a girl of legal age, to cry into a stuffed plushie. It was fine for me to play a game of Pokémon, and get excited when I found a rare spawn.
But that was not all—I had come to a simple realization that it was fine, too, to embrace the woes of aging.
My knees now crack whenever I bend them, but now I laugh rather than fret about it—it is a product of me growing up. My vision is fuzzy from staring at computer screens and test papers, and so I must wear comically large glasses: that is alright, because it’s only natural that my bad habits would lead to this—I only need to rectify them with time. I can no longer run as I used to, or scream and holler with the stamina of a workhorse—but that is fine, because whenever I walk past a playground, I can remember my old games of tag and laugh about how times have changed.
When the day comes where I must work for my money rather than lounge in school, I will do it not just because I must, but because it is simply a new chapter in my life. When the time comes where I have to use a walking stick, I will simply tell my grandchildren that I am attaining a higher life-form, ascending into a mechanical form with a third limb. When my knees begin to wobble, and my gait lessen and slow like a pebble on its last skitter across a pond, I will think of what I thought then, lying in my bed, laughing at old memories as I listened to old music from cartoon shows now long ended and put to rest: I am getting older.
But that is alright.
Just as it is fine for me to lay in my bed and listen—listen to the chirping of cicadas, to little music box renditions of Island Song, Spirited Away’s The Name of Life, and Simple and Clean. To treasure and cherish the past that has long since floated by, and the fuzziest and blurriest of memories that lay fragmented like shattered glass. All those feelings are an important step in the winding, torrential trek that is life.
When I was younger, I wished I would never grow up. Yet, for better or for worse, I have begun to age: not quite to the extent of my middle-aged father, or my 81-year-old grandmother, but the truth of the matter is, I am getting older.
And that is alright with me.
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