It creeps in on you so slowly that you barely even notice it until one day, standing in a fluorescent lit bathroom, you peer closer at that reflection you’ve been playing with for years now, and at the edges of your mouth and eyes, on the once-smooth surface of your forehead, there it is: age.
~
How little I really believed myself capable of it. Yes, I would speak at 15, at 22, of that theoretical Rachel who would one day become old, her hair gone white, her body gone frail. But then I also believed I would become Suburban Rachel, trapped in a hell of her own making with her young children dancing around her as she cleaned the kitchen and thought about the logistics of her commute.
~
I escaped that but I cannot escape this. Can’t I just hear my smug eighteen-year-old voice echoing, “Well I’ll just go gray naturally” and “Wrinkles are beautiful”? Or the twenty six year-old me who came running down the driveway, excitedly, waving that first white hair. As though there would only ever be one. And oh, there’s a part of me that still wants to say that, to do that. But the thing is, it starts coming and I’m just not ready. Not yet.
