Old Airport Road

Oh simple thing, where have you gone
I’m getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you’re gonna let me in
I’m getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

- Keane, “Somewhere Only We Know”

Time keeps marching forward. The day after my mother died, I remember laying on her bed with the dog. I had come home from the hospital the day before and fallen asleep in the bedroom where my mother had spent the last five years of her life confined. I could still smell her on the sheets, on the pillows. The cup beside her bed had a layer of water at the top from where the ice had melted in her sweet tea. Her computer chair was piled high with papers and yellow legal pads. Her ash tray was overflowing with cigarette butts, because towards the end her hand shook too badly for her to finish an entire cigarette in one sitting. But, most of all, I remember that the television in her room was still on. I remember hearing about Obama and the deficit and the Tea Party movement and a million other news stories that did nothing more than confirm for me that the world had kept turning. Somehow, people had gotten out of bed. Somehow, people had gone to work or dropped their kids off at daycare or gone shopping or a thousand other things that had nothing to do with the grief I was feeling. My mother was dead, why wasn’t that on the news?

But time soldiers on.

This week was the three-month anniversary, and the shock and grief of it all has, for the most part, passed. I know now that I am strong enough to do it on my own, even if I don’t believe that any twenty-three year old should have to do it that way. I am an adult, and while I am still young, experience has made me old. I know enough to get myself out of most situations. But there are still moments when my carefully constructed house of cards begins to sway and I start to panic, thinking that everything I’ve built is about to collapse, and I realize that – in the grand scheme of things – I have very few people I could call for help.

That is not to deride or dismiss my friends. I have a lot of them, and they are caring, smart, funny people. They are capable, and I imagine that they are going to do amazing things with their lives. But, with the odd exception, my friends and I have led radically different lives. They feel younger than me – less jaded, more hopeful for the future. They lack a certain amount of lived experience. Ask them to go shopping or explain a primary source or about a relationship, and they are amazing. But ask them the best place to bounce a check in order to get the $25 cash back (non-chain grocery stores) – or how long it would take for that check to post to your account (2-3 business days) – and they are stupefied. None of my friends know that the power company cannot disconnect your power, no matter how late your bill is, so long as you have a medical necessity for keeping the power on. This isn’t something I judge them for, and I wish I had grown up in a house where I didn’t know that the best way to steal from a grocery store was through the self-check out line, or that PayDay Loan places don’t check your credit report when you apply for a loan, and that the maximum loan amount in the state of California is $300. When you are staring down the barrel of a gun, and you need someone to pick up the phone at 1:21am on an idle Tuesday night, you don’t call your friends – you call your mother. When financial aid is trying to screw you over and you don’t remember if you had to file taxes or not and the Bank is trying to take money out of your account and the landlords are upset that you’re a smoker and the car is making a fucked up noise and you have to choose between buying $536 worth of books for school or buying groceries – you don’t want to call your friends; you want to call your mother.

But I can’t.

My mother has been dead for three months now, and I have never felt older in my life. Why have I not gone gray? Why don’t I have wrinkles yet? Why isn’t this aging, which feel so all encompassing, not visible to anyone other than me? “I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on.” It is a simple line from a song released years and years ago, but it gets me every time. That line, that one expression of defeated hope, of silent prayers expressed, of genuine hurt and need is enough to send me over the edge. From the first moment I heard the song, I have always teared up at that line. “I’m getting old, and I need something to rely on.” It has meant different things at different moments in my life. It was about my fear of being single. It was about my lack of close friends. It was about a forgotten birthday. It was about every unmet or failed expectation. And while none of these are wrong, I think what I think about it today is closer to the truth. It is about the sinking feeling that comes when you feel time moving on without you; when every thing and every one is changing, and you witness it only from a distance. I am getting older; every day, every minute, every second I feel myself aging. Not just my body, but my spirit.  “I’m getting old and I need something to rely on.” I feel myself getting weary. Every set back, every hussle, every lie I have to tell myself only adds to the weight on my shoulders; I’m slouching towards something that I’m sure I’ll ever get to.

Something I’m not sure I can get to by myself.

S/Alexander