Time warp

I joined Facebook the other day, which suddenly put me in touch with people I hadn't seen or spoken to since high school or college (or shortly after college, which also seems like way long ago). Since then, I have been getting a vivid feeling of different times in my life existing simultaneously. Like, it is still 1989, my family and I just moved to Middlesex, New Jersey, where every strip mall and restaurant is new to me so I am kind of off-balance, and my mom and I are doing some boring shopping at Karin's Kurtains. I'm sulking because I hate being dragged through stores looking at curtains or bath towels and because, well, I'm 14. It's the summer before high school. Now somehow I am in my mid-thirties and some moments I can't remember anything that came between being 14 and now; it's like the 14-year-old inside me is given a preview of her life later, which is this life I am living, with a sense of "Oh, so that's how it turned out." And if somewhere I am still 14 then there are still all these other possibilities for what could have happened...except I know those possibilities are gone and I'm not going to get any younger from here on out.

At a certain point a switch happens where the future becomes less a source of joy and hope than--just the next thing, possibly a source of dread or worry (middle age, death) and the past becomes something to wallow in. There is no limit to the ways in which I can make myself feel bad for not being 17 or 24 anymore, for wasting whatever presented itself to me then; and the ways I can fear what is ahead (since in our culture, women seem to become invisible somewhere around their mid-40's unless they can afford to inject bacteria into their faces, etc. to keep themselves looking 5-10 years younger, except they don't really look younger, they just look--stretched. Like they are trying. That's what I think, and sign me up for the bacteria injection).

And yet inbetween high school and now, a lot happened and I felt all of it; it wasn't like going into suspended animation or having a dream and waking up. But increasingly it feels that way...and what is real, anyway? The dreams I brush off when I wake up every morning, don't they constitute just as much of my consciousness as whatever story I seem to be living or have lived? I don't know but sometimes I feel there is such a scary vulnerability to aging because you have to do it, to go through time, whether you want to or not and you are on a ride that you can't get off except by death.

And I guess I can't help but feel disappointed in my life now when I look at it after looking through my high school or college year books. Because I feel less fresh and attractive, that is the superficial part, and because never again will there be that sense that there was then that the story wasn't written and that everything was ahead. So no matter how miserable the young are, they know that there is a huge future waiting to be written on, so there is always a way out of whatever unhappiness.

But I don't want this to disintegrate into whining about not being "young." It is more a sense of awe that things really do end and pass. I remember sometime during the high school years, over a summer, taking a tennis clinic or class and practicing at an indoor court. For some reason I was miserable. It was a big echoey ugly building we were in with dividers separating one tennis court from the next; and maybe I wasn't doing well at my game or I didn't like the other people at the camp; I don't even know anymore. There was just an intense feeling of misery, time dragging on, of this-will-never-end, and then a sudden liberating knowledge that seemed to lift me up out of that building, that self and whole time of life, and say, No, this will end and something else will be true, you won't be 16 forever.