The Old

"  T h e    O l d  "

     

I realized I was waddling last night.

 

            I made my way up to the top of the stairs, waddling instead of walking with a youthful gate. In fact, I wasn’t walking at all. I was just shifting, barely moving my feet off the ground. My right shoulder would go forward… and then my left one would follow suit.

 

My joints cracked and creaked. The fat on my body wiggled, spasmed and drooped with every little movement. That blank fuzziness flooded my senses. It felt like a constant headache that had been dulled down by a few degrees. I always know it’s there but it’s not awful enough that I can’t live with its presence during all of my waking hours.

 

My stomach was still digesting the food from dinner hours ago. I could feel it rumble and spurt, the acidity from the meal not resting well in the confines of my body. In the morning, I would awaken with the food still struggling to make a home. I could feel hot liquid jetting back and forth within my throat. It’s never made its way into my mouth but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t stop trying. A knife rests in my mid section. I feel bloated, swelling puffying up my oily cheeks. My feet throb and ache as if begging for a foot massage that will never come to them. And I’ll get out of bed, hunched over from the pain boiling in my stomach. I’ll get up and waddle to the bathroom.

 

My dad waddles. His grotesque, oversized gut hangs over his faded, black pants as he waddles directionless around the kitchen. He’s almost fifty. I’m only twenty-two.

 

I can remember standing on a boat dock with my family at Walt Disney World when I was eight years old. I was looking out over the calm water while we waited for the boat to come over to transport us over to the MGM Studios portion of the park. The sun was vivid and a nice, gentle breeze brushed through my light hair. Moments ago, our hotel had just charged me on my mother’s account as an adult because of my age. Obviously, it was just a ploy to get more money out of my parents. After all, what’s Disney better at? Still, the idea of being listed as an adult plagued my mind.

 

“I’m an adult?” I had asked.

 

When I first asked this question out loud, I can remember a laugh and smile ejecting from my body. What a funny concept. Me. An adult.

 

However, as I continued to look out at the calm water on that beautiful day, I can remember a distinct fear settling in the depths of my stomach. One day, I was going to be a teenager. Then, I was going to be a grown up. Looking down at my small limbs and acne-free skin, this fear seemed ridiculous. Now, I was a kid. I was always going to be a kid. That’s what I would always be. I would never get old, read the paper, kiss a girl, get a job or any of that other nonsense. That just wasn’t me and it never would be.

Never.

 

A buzzing sound then filled my ears. The boat was finally approaching. Quickly, thoughts about aging left my brain and were replaced with the anticipation of riding the Tower of Terror.

 

Years later, I can remember riding in the car with my mother, brother and sister on errand run. As we pulled into the parking lot of the store, we got on a conversation on how I would be going into junior high soon. I made jokes about how I would always be the kid I was. I would never end up being the stereotypical angst-filled teenager I always seen in movies and on TV. No, that wasn’t me. I was a fun loving kid who would never grow old, whose favorite store would always be Toys ‘R Us and who would never, ever like a gross, cootie-infected girl. And I certainly wouldn’t be a lame, angry teenager who hated the world. No, that would never be me.

 

Never.

 

Every day that I got into my mom’s car during my seventh grade year, she asked me how my day was. Every day, I lied and said “Good.”

 

One day, I stood in the urine-colored junior high bathroom with my friend Ken after first period Pre-Algebra. I tried to stifle the tears coming out of my eyes as I wiped the chalk powder out of my t-shirt. Just minutes ago, Evan had picked up the chalk eraser and slammed it against my chest, causing a jet of powder to spray all over my shirt and face. Benjamin then attempted to one up Evan by faking a farting sound and blaming it all on me. In horror, I watched as the girl sitting across from me lit up.

 

“Hey everybody, Wesley farted!” she spit.

 

The whole class then burst out in laughter. Just seconds before, the girl that said this had been my crush. Now, she was just another source of hatred.

 

Back in the urine-colored bathroom, hot tears were beginning to hit the grimy sink. I found myself whipping around and kicking the wall as hard as I possibly could. As my foot hit, a thud cut across the tight space of the bathroom. I cursed. I told Ken how bad I hated everyone. I told him how bad I wanted to hurt them all. I told him how I wasn’t going to take it anymore. That I was sick of it and it would have to stop.

 

Little did I know that Ken would just become another one of my tormenters in just a year’s time.

 

In the eighth grade, I can remember being beaten by sticks by Ken, Langston and Kyle all before class one day. We were all hanging around a tree, talking about what had happened on WWF Monday Night Raw the night before. Then, someone picked up a stick that used to exist as a branch on that tree. Before I knew it, they hit me with it. I heard laughter… soft but distinct laughter. Then, someone else picked up a stick. There was more hitting and laughing. Minutes later, I remember standing in that same urine-colored bathroom, looking into the mirror. There were bruises on legs underneath my jeans and cuts on my arms. My face was red. I wanted to cry but I couldn’t. I stood there, looking into the mirror. I was alone. And I couldn’t explain to myself why this had happened. There was no reason. No reason at all. These were my friends that did this. My friends.

 

I stood there, looking into mirror. I stood there and I thought, “I’m going to remember this when I’m forty. This is going to stay with me for the rest of my life. This is going to change me. This is going to change everything. And I’ll never forgot it.”

 

Now I waddle through the room and sit down on my worn seat on the living room couch. I feel numb and over-medicated. Every now and then, I’ll go through things that should be painful and heartbreaking. However, they don’t hurt the way they used to. Now, I’m just down and out… and then I get over it. You could say I’ve matured and learned how to deal with life. But, to tell you the truth, my apathy terrifies me. As the days go by, I have more and more trouble identifying with those horrible teenage years. It’s almost like they didn’t happen… or as if they happened to someone else. I’m starting to worry that, as the years continue to go by, I’ll forget completely. And it’ll be as if they never happened and that I went through all of that for nothing. All for nothing.

 

Sometimes, I’ll find myself doing things to try to re-capture the feeling of these bitter days. I’ll wander into my room, plug my guitar into my dust-caked amp and start creating noise. I’ll do this for a few minutes and then stop because I realize I don’t know how to tune the guitar, I’ve forgotten all the chords to the old songs I knew or that my hands feel sweaty.

 

Times have changed. I don’t play guitar religiously anymore. I don’t have a mushroom hair cut with bangs covering my eyebrows. I don’t wear a jacket that’s three sizes too big. I don’t study until the moment I pass out. I don’t feel too scared to talk to girls. Donnie Darko is no longer the greatest movie I have ever seen. Kurt Cobain is no longer my hero.

 

Today, I find myself forgetting if I’ve locked the door just seconds ago. Everything is fuzzy and off.  I’m getting bumps and fat in strange places. The amount of moles on my skin seems to be increasing. Hair seems intent on taking over the entire surface of my body, popping up in places that don’t even make sense. My face is worn and uneven after too many cases of razor burn. I have love handles and faded stretch marks from when I was excessively overweight. After eating a meal, I’ll feel high and unable to think straight for hours, coughing up mucus and fluid as I struggle to breath properly. I have a permanent worry wrinkle that stains my forehead from just twenty-two years on this planet. I feel like I’m swelling most of the day. I find myself looking for signs of cancer on my body more than once a week.

 

The scary part is that these are supposed to be the best years of my life. These are supposed to be the moments that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. My dad once told me that he and his friends got drunk one day in college and had a crazy idea. They became obsessed with swimming in the Pacific Ocean. So you know what? They did it. They went to the airport and got the cheapest tickets they could to California. They got on a plane in Jackson, Mississippi and flew on over. They arrived in California around 2 am and drove to the nearest beach. They then jumped into the freezing cold Pacific Ocean water and swam for about an hour.

 

I’ve never flown to California on a drunken whim to swim in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve never done much of anything. I went through high school without partying or going on a single date. I don’t know what it’s like to be in a car on the side of the road on a cold night with a girl, making out just to stay warm and because we’re both just tired of talking. I’ve never had a hang over or experienced what it’s like to drink so much that I vomit uncontrollably. I don’t know what that’s like.

 

The closest to all of this that I can think of is a memory of being six years old, avoiding a bath. These were the days way before my obsessive-compulsive disorder took hold. Back then, being clean was a cardinal sin. I can remember stripping naked for the bath under my mother’s supervision and then somehow escaping the bathroom. I ran to the back door, opened it and crouched down outside to hide. It was early December and it was freezing outside. I sat crouched there completely naked on the back porch in the freezing wind. I did this all because I didn’t want to take a bath. In that moment, I can remember thinking about the ridiculousness of the situation. Even then, I knew what I was doing was stupid. Still, as the wind shot up my then hairless, pale skin, I felt strangely refreshed. I was completely exposed, out in the cold, harsh nature. After awhile, I stopped crouching. I stood up and began to walk around. I wasn’t cold anymore. As I breathed, the air felt cleaner and more refreshing than it ever had before. Dust and dirt particles were beginning to turn the bottom of my feet grey but I didn’t care. In that moment, nothing else really mattered. In that moment, I felt more alive than I ever have before.

 

Now, all I want to do is sleep. I find myself sleeping for hours at a time. Most of my days tend to be lost to this ritual. When I do lie in bed, I find myself bringing up a fantasy that I used to have as a child. I fantasize that I’m in a bed in a giant, steel box. The box surrounds me on all sides, protecting me from all the evil of the world. I’ve been imagining this for every night since I was about five years old. Every night, it’s always this image that calms me enough to let go of consciousness for a few hours.

 

In a way, I feel like this tells me I’m still that little kid that stood on that boat dock, laughing at the absurdity of being an adult. I’m still that little kid inside that hid outside on the back porch naked in the freezing cold just because I wanted to stay dirty. I think I’m still that kid but trapped in this oversized, winkling, fat body with a constant, dull headache and terrible indigestion.

 

I’m still afraid of driving on a highway. The fact that I drive at all seems absurd. Women, in a sense, still terrify me. Deep down, I still wish that I could walk into Toys ‘R Us to treat myself. I can’t tie a knot to save my life. Doing laundry is a mystic ritual still very foreign to me. Making the bed still doesn’t seem right.

 

I’m old. I’m getting old. At least, I am in mind and body. I still approach things as a child deep inside, faking a lot of these mature gestures and decisions. However, I feel like the child is getting lost somewhere in there. Will he still be there when I’m fifty? When my hair turns grey and falls out?

 

No, that’ll never happen. Can you imagine that? Me? An old man? As a grandfather with grandchildren and a family? I can’t see that happening. I can’t see myself shifting through the house, my legs moving slowly just so they don’t break off. My single forehead winkle put to shame by thousands of others that have taken over my body like an evil parasite. Eating oatmeal during all meals just because it’s easier to chew and digest than all the other foods. Hearing everything in a fuzzy haze and complaining about my grandkid’s music being too loud. Sitting in a hospital bed with multiple tubes cutting through my body as they try to kill the cancer that is slowly eating me alive.

 

What an absurd notion that is. No, I’ll never be a grandfather. I’ll never have grey hair. I’ll never have false teeth. No, I’ll never be that old.

 

Never.