Middle Age

I’m long past middle age, but my joke has always been that no matter how old I get, I will be forever approaching middle age. I wonder sometimes if the joke is on me.

I mean, people give me a look of incredulity when I say that I’m coming up on middle age.  And I have a feeling that the facial expression they give me masks perhaps a smile, maybe raucous laughter even, or possibly a cringing fear about whether I’m crazy.

I try to recall that time.  Being plop in the middle of what would be accepted as ‘middle age’.  I have to say that I was in a pretty dark place and had lost track of what it was exactly I was doing and where I was headed.

Sometimes I think that’s why I’m so lighthearted about my age now.  I emerged from that period, although at times I thought I never would, and having lived through it, I knew that the only thing that could stop me after that was death.

Bulletproof.  That’s the way I felt after I healed, after I reached the top.

And my sense of humor, while it had been healthy before then – when I in reality was approaching ‘middle age’ – it took off.  In many ways, I became the life of the party.

Oddly, however, at the same time I also became more serious about certain things.  Especially my writing.

Yes, it was what I’d call a bitter period of my life, that dark time.  At one point I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks.  Really, death looked pretty good then.  That was the bottom point.  The nadir for all you SAT/GRE fans.

It was as if my life had always been headed for the bottom of a hill.  It felt more and more like a cliff as I approached the bottom.  And when I hit it, splat, when the end ended, after a long time wandering around in the mire, I finally realized that I might be headed back up.

Things were a little foggy after that realization.  And even the times sloshing around in the muck were only dim memories.  It was kind of like I’d been living a dream.  The way the covid years appear to me now.  For some reason, I can barely remember them.

As is also true about the time of covid, as I say, I felt bitterness for the time I’d lost.  Those years can never be recovered, never be made up for.

And that fogginess followed me on my journey out of the pit.  I knew I was healing, but the details faded from me as fast as they were realized.

Strange how I just slid uphill, not knowing much about the way I was going or how I was getting there.  But I knew I was recovering, and there was comfort in that.  The way it is when you’re on a bullet train.  The landscape may blur, become dizzying, and might disorient and even distort you as you travel.  You know, however, that a destination is ahead, and it is one you instinctively know will be a good place at which to arrive.