ulay, oh

Sometimes you're sitting at your desk and nearing the end of the tenth page of some dreary report, and you realize you're turning 20 and your youth is almost gone. Come five or six years, life will be entirely different. You'll be out in the dreaded working world, surrounded by a flurry of business suits, paperwork, and money. For a moment, you let yourself think about the future, the present, the past, and you delve into an overwhelming sense of paralysis and helplessness when you realize that you are getting old.

You realize your eyes - once bright and hopeful - are dull and tired now. You realize that your spine has curved so much and your shoulders are growing increasingly hunched as you spend days bent over endless piles of work. You realize your lifestyle is repetitive and monotonous now. You realize you don't go to the supermarket with your mother anymore; you used to be the one in charge of picking out the best apples and weighing them. You realize you don't have time for the things you used to love so much, like curling up in a library couch to read books, or just lying in bed listening to various genres of music. You realize all the things you had excitedly raved about when you were younger, like travelling to exotic countries and climbing mountains - those dreams just aren't realistic anymore. There's no time, "time's a goon" (as my favorite book astutely pointed out). You realize life probably isn't going to be what you want it to be; life is going to be a bitch, people are going to be cruel, and after everything you will simply die and vanish from the face of the earth. You realize you have no idea how you got from twelve to here and you don't even know what or where 'here' is, you are so lost. You realize that you are trying so hard to hold onto time but it's slipping from your fingers; you are pleading, desperately bargaining with life and praying that you never grow old, but you are growing old, it's happening now, it's happening every second, your cells are ageing and dying and every part of you is too; you will never get this time back and there is nothing (nothing at all!) that you can do about it - you pause to think of all this, and then you feel sad.

You are trapped, for a brief period, where the nostalgia is too much and you want to cry - even though you're still in your 20 year old body, youthful, and it is nonsensical that you feel nostalgic about a time that has not passed yet. You realize you will never be this young again.

Then it all passes, you remember that it is pointless to let such debilitating thoughts subdue you. You put all these thoughts at the top of a very, very high shelf in your mind, lock the door, and carry on with life without thinking about all this for a long time. You've known all this already, everyone does. Just don't think about it.