The bathroom light has never been kind, but lately it has turned into something closer to an interrogation. I lean in to do whatever it is a man my age does at a mirror, and there he is. The temple has crept back another quarter inch. The grey that started as one stubborn strand by the ear has spread into a small grizzled territory. Around the eyes, lines that no longer leave when the smile leaves. I stand there longer than I mean to.
Some mornings I see my father in the glass. Not the young father of the old photographs, the one with the thick black hair and the cigarette, but the later one. The one I used to think of as old. The face arrives slowly. It does not announce itself. One day you are simply wearing it.
I am not forty yet. I am close enough to hear it breathing in the next room. And the strange part is how quietly it comes. You brace for something loud. There is a whole industry built on the loud version, the one with the sports car and the affair and the sudden urge to buy a guitar. Mine came in the way damp comes into a wall. You do not catch it arriving. You catch it one morning already there, in the plaster, in the bone.
What it comes down to, mostly, is arithmetic. You finally do the sum you spent your twenties refusing to do. If nothing goes wrong, if you are lucky, you might reach eighty. Which makes this the middle. The top of the hill. And for the first time you can see the road on the far side running down, and you can make out, faint but unmistakable, where it ends. Not soon. But there. Waiting with the patience of something that has never once been in a hurry.
People will tell you things. They mean well. Forty is the new thirty, as though the years were a currency you could revalue at will. Your real life is only starting, they say, and you nod, because what else are you going to do. The friends who still call, call, and we talk around the edge of it, and for an hour the weight lifts, and then they hang up and it lowers itself back down over the furniture. Someone can love you, can hold you the whole night, and you will still come awake at four in the morning alone with it, because there are rooms you have to sit in by yourself, and this is one of them.
I have gone looking in books. God knows I have gone looking in books. The Stoics and their cold comfort, telling me to keep death in mind as though that were the cure and not the disease itself. The Buddhists and their impermanence, which is true, so plainly true that it accounts for everything and relieves nothing. The poets who stood in front of this same darkness and made something beautiful out of it, and the beauty moved me, and the darkness did not move an inch. You can underline every wise line ever written and the grey still comes for the comb in the morning.
That is the part I was not prepared for. That none of it works. Not the friends, not the love, not the philosophy, not the careful words of the people who walked through here before me. They are not worthless. They are simply not an exit. There is no exit. I keep arriving back at that, over and over, like a man patting down his pockets for keys he already knows are gone.
What aches is not the dying. It is the closing of the doors. In your twenties every door stands open and you walk past them without a glance, sure you will come back, sure there is time. Then somewhere in here you turn around and half of them have quietly shut. The you that might have left for another country. The you that would have learned the instrument, written the book at twenty-five instead of circling it at thirty-nine, stayed with the person you let walk out. They are not dead, exactly. They live in a house you can no longer find the road to. You get one life and it turns out to be this one, and the others slide away the way the platform slides away once the train has begun to move.
And time stops behaving. A year used to be a long slow country you travelled through. Now it is a corridor you are hurried down. The festivals come round so fast they seem to be chasing one another. You meet a child, you look away, you look back and the child is taller than you. Whole seasons pass that you would swear you slept straight through. They say this is only the brain measuring each new year against the sum of all the years before it, so that every year becomes a thinner slice of the whole, and the explanation is elegant and does not buy you back a single afternoon.
So what do you do with it. I wish I had something worth the price of the question. I do not. I get up. The kettle wants filling. There is work, and the day makes its small demands, and the demands are almost a kindness, because they crowd out the larger question for a while. I make the tea. I stand at the window and look at the same morning I have looked at a thousand times, the kites wheeling over the rooftops, the autos already bickering in the lane below, and I feel the whole grey weight of it settle on my chest, and I drink the tea regardless.
I have no neat ending for this. That absence is the ending. Not that it gets better. Not that there is a lever the wise ones found and the rest of us missed. Only that the grey keeps coming and you keep combing it, and the face in the glass goes on quietly becoming someone you never agreed to be, and you carry it, because there is nothing to do but carry it, and because the morning, indifferent and ordinary, arrives all the same, whether or not you are ready to meet it.
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