25
1.
What can change in a year?
Everything.
2.
I remember spending last year’s birthday in Portland, Maine. It had rained that afternoon, covering the small fisherman’s town with, more than usual, the smell of the sea. I strolled around town after work and stumbled upon a small bistro in the walls of an old building made of exposed bricks. “A table for one”, I gestured to the waitress who promptly sat me by the counter next to a man in blue overalls sipping quietly, his beer. “A clam risotto with half a dozen oysters…and a beer please.”
The waitress went away and came back with plates in both hands. I ate, quietly, and perhaps sensing that a conversation would not be struck and that I had broken some inviolable code of small town courtesy by remaining silent, the man next to me finished his beer and went on his way. I ate, quieter still, and on the last bite of food, a tear, unannounced, came streaming down my face, slowing my chewing. Oh! The strange land of tears, why have you come for me now? It couldn’t be for something as banal as feeling sorry for oneself, I thought, it’s your birthday after all. The land of tears has no sense of banality.
A year has come and gone and I’ve turned 25. I can still see out the corner of my eye the young man sitting alone in the bistro. He looks just like me, yet he seems so far away from me. Strange: how the mind works.
3.
Twice a week, often in the afternoon, I would visit America’s Weatherman in his palliative care unit. Not much has changed in a year: his limbs a little slimmer, his breathing a little heavier. His eyes remain closed to the world: sleeping, dreaming, thinking, or remembering, nobody knows.
Every once in a while, in some miraculous burst of energy, his eyes would spring open. Through some tiny expression of awe, you could see he had recognized you and have many things that he wished to say to you. Yet all his body would allow is an inaudible groan and the twitching of the hand (a soul so helplessly imprisoned by failing flesh). Soon thereafter, the light would go out once more in his gaze as he close his eyes to an unfamiliar world.
Sitting back in the afternoon light, I watch as nurses shuffle busily in the hallway to the sounds of monotone beeps. Patients turn and turn again on their narrow hospital beds, some with their family watching, most, alone. Inexplicably and without notice, a sense of absurdity overcame me. Life (taxes, power points, the vastness of the universe) seemed to me, in that moment, utterly absurd. I turn to face the window behind me and watch, as cars flash past the busy road.
4.
Today I woke to the sound of birds chirping, on a bed in the old house I grew up in. I open the blinds to let in the morning light. The house bustles in a manner typical of a Sunday morning: pacing, chattering, cooking.
I make my way to the living room, where my family scatters lazily across the couch. My father turns and greets me with a warm smile while my mother hurries back and forth between the dining table and the kitchen, yelling: ‘Get down here, lunch is almost ready’. My brothers and I take our seats at the table, one teasing the other. The warm dishes arrive one after another, flooding the room with an aroma that slows the chattering. My father takes his seat next to me and so Sunday lunch begins.
I ate, slowly, steadily, when suddenly, I felt behind me a pair of eyes peering in. Peering in? Yes, peering in; in the same way that not long ago I peered into the life of the young man in the bistro. And at once, I felt seized by a melancholy for this moment, as though I were hanging onto something definitively lost, something that with each passing second sunk irrevocably into the current of lost time.
Where (or more precisely, when) did this pair of eyes come from? A year from now? 10? 20? 30? I looked once more at this scene before me and smiled, almost gleefully, relieved that all is not entirely lost. For those eyes looking back, I took extra care to savor this moment.
My brother looks up and asks ‘why the smile?’
‘Nothing’, I say
and continued eating.
5.
“SO, YOUR LIFE. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.
A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.”
