07.08.18

it was fitting, perhaps, that my first press trip in a few years popped up after this summer's Circle of Life Tour (chicago for a friend's wedding and visiting my college roommate and her newborn son, then on to california to meet my sister's newborn son and attend a family reunion). i seem to have reached an age at which bystanders need to talk about my age, and...okay? i mentioned that i was going to rome for my fortieth birthday this fall and a new friend on said press trip gave me the "oh, you don't look it!" that i gave a friend a few years ago on a hike in hawaii; i now get that that sentiment is always weird. a few days later i climbed up to a sports bar for the england-colombia world cup match and a twentyish guy rolled up to me with a glinting grill: "you're a cute Mature Woman," said he. a day or two later i was assured that i was still voluptuous. which is all fine, i am okay with the fact that i have a face and a body that are visible to others despite my efforts to sidle through life like an eel, but i'm realizing that i love the existence i've had at my bird hospital and my bookstore. while it's clear that i'm older than the film students helping me shelve books and that one weird guy who kept working into every conversation that he was born in 1996 (that's your calling card? really?) and that V was born several decades before i was, i guess i thought we were all...ageless and kind of formless? that because i assume most of my acquaintances are like me, they assume i'm like them?

i've been talking to my dear friend L about this—a friend who's gotten things like, "she's pretty sexy for an old lady!"—and would like to say that i've come up with a graceful response to the faux spit-takes about my age, but man, that shit is weird. i spent this week hearing nineties alt-rock at various resort-adjacent spots and thinking about how those same pool decks spun golden oldies a generation ago—who doesn't want to hear their high-school hits when they're on their long-earned vacation?—and realizing that, son of a bitch, i'm old. it's fine, this is how the world ends, but i thought i had more time.

i shared my flight home from st. thomas with a couple of paralytically privileged kids who were en route to the hamptons for the night; she might or might not have been his girlfriend, but he was definitely her project, as he lurched into our seats and spent four hours curling into her lap, ordering cups of water in triplicate, and puking them back into his seat. at one point he sat with a demitasse of bile on his tray for like half an hour, and she glinted up at me, apologetically: thank you so much, i'm so sorry. i have been sixteen, and you will be forty, and i told the angry folks across the aisle that i withstood you because i don't fancy airport jail but in truth i don't want to have outgrown understanding you.