In some way you are diminished, and so these businesses—the moviehouse, the grocery, the Goodwill, the discount store that already slashes prices—knock a percentage off your purchases as a gesture of compassion for your shrunken condition. You don’t exactly feel old, unless you happen to notice your wizened visage in the mirror or the pain in your joints or the ancient habits you repeat as if in perpetuity, but you know you are.
In some way you are diminished, and so these businesses—the moviehouse, the grocery, the Goodwill, the discount store that already slashes prices—knock a percentage off your purchases as a gesture of compassion for your shrunken condition. You don’t exactly feel old, unless you happen to notice your wizened visage in the mirror or the pain in your joints or the ancient habits you repeat as if in perpetuity, but you know you are. You see pierced babes and tattooed dudes in the sexual heat of early summer shedding that warmth in waves as they walk entwined on Front Street, and know in your bones from a long way off exactly that romance in retrospect, an old-school honor roll of remembered loves, each eternal in its moment, every one always lost somehow, even the one you married, because you’re driven like gulls by a stiff wind or kelp in surf tumbling into oblivion, with art your only flotation device, if briefly, before a tsunami of devastating abstractions—time, history, transience, change—up and wipes you out. That’s why it’s cheaper to watch a film, or buy that secondhand shirt on Tuesdays, or that basket of fresh figs you will taste intensely as if for the last time. Even if your mother lived to be 94 and your dad only died at 75 because of those big dark cigars he smoked, and half your aunts and uncles put up an epic fight, you’re doomed, get used to it, and while you’re at it enjoy these warming days between natural and man-made disasters when the mild sky swears it will stay sunny and the air carries currents of birdsong and honeysuckle, and though you seem to be losing friends in a plague of irreversible disappearances, you are more present than ever, tasting twilight like a dry white wine with a crisp yet paradoxically endless finish. You’re acutely aware of the creamy flowers in the magnolia across the street, and the fog in its slow cool takeover of the bay, and the zephyr caressing your neck like some phantom hand.
