When I was nineteen, I wrote a poem about getting older.
This is that poem.
Time is tricky. Not in a dramatic sense, but in the sort of gradual sense where years go by and suddenly you realize that you’re not twenty anymore. Yet there are still those days when your back doesn’t hurt and you get enough sleep and you eat properly and you may, in fact, still feel twenty.
They say – these same people who once advised that time will creep up on you until it smacks you in the face – that a similar phenomenon happens with offspring: one minute they are clinging to your leg while you are trying to use the bathroom and the next they only come over when they need to do their laundry.
And so.
We shall see.
Maybe I’ll write a poem another twenty years from now, when my children are grown.
It might read:
I wake early, before the rest of the house
To enjoy my coffee in quiet
I trip over a discarded sock; it’s my own
There’s not a matchbox car or a small plastic brick
And then I remember that my children
Are adults: old enough to drive cars and sign mortgages
And have their own children
Thus my coffee mornings will be quiet
From now on.
Suddenly, I realize that they were right.
They were all so right.
Time flies slowly then disappears in the blink of an eye.
