Middle Age
Here I am. Wedding ring on the finger. Child in the bathtub. Dishes in the sink waiting to be scrubbed. All the other lives I could have lived flash around the wheel, and this is where the marble fell.
‘It’s not so bad, I suppose,’ I say to convince myself.
I’m changing with the beat of the weather, which went from cold to hot with the pull of the shades. It’s only April and the desert is already thick with the sticky sweet burn of summer, and here I am, wondering if it is considered acceptable for a middle-aged woman to go braless. That’s right, middle-aged. A reckoning that I can’t shake off or quite come to terms with. It feels like some strange mistake, as if ten years were somehow snuck in under my mattress.
No, I don’t regret my 20s or 30s. But I don’t miss them either. The hours I spent weeping into my hands about my body, my mother, my wasted dreams, have all dried up and withered away. The laughter and wild streaky nights, and the most alive I’ve ever felt are now just an indulgent reminiscence. The good years, the shameful years, the hard years — I’ve tucked them all away like photographs of old lovers in the back of a drawer.
There’s this power that I’ve become aware of recently. This realization that I can still change my direction at any time. An about face. A second act. Why not take a secret lover ? Why not flee my job and seek travel, adventure and chase my passions? I could leave my husband if I so desired. I could simply wake up one morning and pack up my clothes and make-up and barrel down the Pacific Coast Highway flicking away every last thing I loathe about my life like cigarette ashes into the wind. All these things seem just as imaginable as skipping out of work early one afternoon to have my nails polished or lounge in a café sipping coffee and reading poetry.
And instead, here I am passing each day like the last until ten years from now they become pressed together and turned into a curious little fossil I can examine in my palm.
