IF

When I was 13 years old, I wrote in my journal that my number one goal for my life was to die on my 100th birthday. It is 11:58 PM on March 31, 2022 as of writing this. I have been 26 years old for 10 days and I am hardly an expert at being one. I don’t understand what I’m doing or what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m closer to 30 years old than I am to 20 yet I still feel like I’m 22, maneuvering life through some kind of cartesian theater rather than experiencing and developing something of my own. For quite some time, life has been happening to me. At 26, it’s hard for me to imagine another 74 years and I no longer have the desire to be on the earth for that long. I have been alive for 9.506 days and if I am destined to live for 100 years then I have lived 9,506 days out of 36,525 days. The reality is that I am unlikely to live 36,525 days but if I do, I think I'll be better off if I start counting the days off right now. 

Life has been long and hard, 74 added years sounds like a prison sentence. My grandfather, the oldest direct male relative I’ve ever known, only lived 73 years in total. 26,723 days to be exact. If I was to live 36,525 days then I think I would say that I would be an unlucky man. But how low does that number need to go for me to be a lucky man? 

I want to have children (I think) and a healthy pregnancy is generally around 9 months. So that’s an extra 270 days on top of what I already have. I don’t want kids for another 3 years minimum, so add another 1,095 days on that. I want to have children with a woman I love and if that woman is not currently in my life then it would definitely take an extra 3 years compounded with that. So add another 1,095. I want to be there for my children, all 3 of them, spaced 2-3 years apart. Being there, in today’s world does not stop at 18. Really it never stops. So add another 24 years or 8,760 days just to be safe. While that’s going on, I’ll need the time to travel the world and help my people and publish my novels and listen to my music and cook my meals and make my movies and read my books and love everyone who I am supposed to love. Love takes a long time. Add on another 2,000 days. I’ll need time to say goodbye to my mother, my other parents, and my siblings who will all outlive me if I am lucky. Give me at least 365 days to say goodbye. After all of that, I think I’ll need time to rest. Bestow me another 3 days for that. I am not the best at math, but the total sum is 23,094 days. As of now I need to live 23,094 days to have lived a lucky life.   

MAYBE 

If I am officially in the second quarter of my life, maybe it is too early for a mid-life crisis. The deeper I crept into my teen years, the less time I wanted to live. 100, 90, 75, 60, 50, 40, 30, 25, 20, 15. Even now, at 26, it is hard for me to put my life into perspective simply because at some point in the past it was difficult for me to imagine this current point in my life at all. The middle of my life has been in constant flux along with my expectations and maybe that’s the way to live. I never saw the harm in a radical seizure of one’s youth, we will never be as young as we are now ever again. Maybe I will die tomorrow and if so, my mid-life wish was to live until I was 100 years old. I think there is some beauty in that. 

Getting older is a beautiful process, even if it does not always have the most positive interiority. I am more intelligent, more successful, funnier, more handsome, wealthier, and better adjusted now than I have been at any other point in time. Great things have been coming with age and maybe I’d appreciate them more if I didn’t count them off or saddle myself with expectations of what 26 is supposed to be compared to what I’ve felt so far. 

PROBABLY 

My mother was 25 years old when she gave birth to me, a few months removed from being 26. She will turn 52 this year (sorry momma). I didn’t know until I got older, but my mother always said she did not think she would live to 30. Or 40. And certainly not 50. Maybe this disbelief of my ability to persist was inherited. We live despite ourselves and I think it’s safe to say we both have a lot to live for. Another 26 years probably won’t be that bad. I’m sure I’d find many more people to love and feel pain deeper than anything I could imagine. 26 makes me think a lot about death even though I am still young, I no longer feel young. I feel like a young man masquerading as an old man masquerading as a young man. I don’t know what to do with myself on day 9,506… maybe I'll figure it out on day 9,507. Or the day after that. And so on. I probably won’t die tomorrow.   

🦋

published April 1, 2022