Since When Did “You’re Old” Become The Biggest Burn?
Ageism is alive and kicking, friends.
Age is the hurt you never thought you’d feel until it becomes your shadow. It sits beside you, tends to your wounds, reminds you of the limbs that ache, the knees that crack, the wiry grays that coil and sprout, and the lines that slowly creep up on your face —you are a foreign country. Suddenly, everyone is loud — why are they shouting? Why can’t the world simply whisper? And you watch the kids so desperate to be older and you want to shake them. Tell them to stop time. Burn all the clocks if you have to. Remain here, just as you are, as young as you’ll ever be.
Because, at a certain point, the world will forever remind you that you’re no longer young.
Last week, I stand in front of a massive blue bin of used clothes. The room is a hothouse, it teems with people. Teenagers in t-shirts and shorts. An enclave of abuelitas speaking Spanish and examining linens. Girls, who are not yet women, wearing the clothes we wore in college, singing the songs we used to sing. They’d rewind the tape if they knew that a tape is. Go back to the 90s when phones were not appendages. When our every movement wasn’t documented on the level of surveillance. Jettison back to the 2000s when we thought we were revolutionary with our new century slang, questionable…
