Seems like I can see every vein in my hands now and in them I see my future mirrored in a memory.
I was 16 and spent a couple days a week volunteering in a nursing home. There was one woman in particular whose skin was so transparent that she resembled Slim Goodbody. Every vein could be traced to its source.
I remember weaving her delicate features together in my mind like one of my 7th period pencil drawings scrawled secretly under cover of my textbook. I wanted to make her mine. She was something, not someone, I needed to capture for a moment, in order to transform the cruel inhuman state of her body into what I knew it must have been.
I needed to give her identity beyond the capacity of my mind to comprehend. But what I was trying to grasp eluded me and I gave up, preferring to leave her as she was in my mind, eternally old.
Last night L in one of her drunken banters went on for longer than was appropriate about how beautiful I am and how young I appear. I laughed internally as I fidgeted. But it wasn’t a “ha-ha so funny” kinda laugh, or even the typical “gotta love flattery” kinda laugh. I was so completely overwhelmed with the irony of the statement that I laughed bitterly, at the realization of my body’s complete betrayal of my spirit. How could I “look so young” and feel so old. Where was the “your only as young as you feel cliché”? Because I feel have always felt ancient.
This morning I looked at my hands and decided they looked old. Yet somehow I still felt betrayed. I thought of the old woman I tried to immortalize in my mind. How the skin around her simply began to melt away as she faded. I wondered at the fact that that was beginning to happen to me, that today perhaps it was my hands, but someday it would be all of me and I would simply fade away before the eyes of some 16 year old desperately trying to piece me back together in an attempt to understand her own mortality.
Today I am step closer to grasping mine.