I feel myself growing older. For some reason in my mind I have an image of shattering glass playing in reverse; millions of shards fly through the abyss to gradually complete a whole, unblemished, crystalline surface. Each day brings me new slivers of perspective and another day lived, and every once in a while I can feel how different my thoughts are from what they used to be. I don’t feel brilliant or wise or even less stupid, I just feel… older.

I’m not angry about certain things. I feel a reflexive impulse to open the gates, to let frustration billow and swell and muffle my good mood, to fire up and rage before slipping away to die. I open myself to these feelings, but the anger doesn’t come. I understand now, why people do some of the things they do. I understand that others are just as fragile and defensive and irrational as I. Everyone has their childhood issues, their insecurities, desperate desires stubbornly out of reach and coping mechanisms to accept them.

We’ve always been children, you and I. We fought so hard to prove to the world otherwise and god, how we wasted our time! What were we racing towards, what was the rush? Why did we run so frantically from the sweet carelessness of our youth? We cared so deeply, so desperately about so many of the wrong things. How silly those things seem from a distance! Why did we let them enrage us?

It’s all a dull throb now, those silly little things that once meant everything. I see reasons all around me to get upset but they mean nothing. There’s so much more to all of this than the slights, the injustices, the nagging thoughts of mediocrity and inability and insignificance. We stand beloved, just as we always have, just as we always will. Joy flashes through my limbs: we’re conquering our sadness, my love! The things that once consumed us stand powerless! I want to thrust out my arms and rejoice, I want to run in the grass and the sun towards the future and endless oblivion. I want to grab your hand and face the world, and with your hand in mine walk forward.

But you are elsewhere now, I know. You are with me but in a different way. You are the ink on my skin, the salt of memory-born tears, the wisp of tobacco smoke that encircled you as you embraced a lucky strike in the snow. Slowly, with each passing day, I come closer to accepting this.

I talk to you, you know. Like a lunatic I look up to the sky and chuckle about all the things you’d find funny. I roll my eyes and mutter to you throughout the day, convinced I can gauge your reaction to a tee. But there are things I don’t know about you, darling. There are things we hid from each other out of pride and distrust, all the while convinced we knew everything worth knowing about the other. We were blinded by how well we thought we knew each other; in some regards we were almost strangers.

That’s another thing each day gives me: scraps of truth that reveal how little I know and how tremendously little I knew yesterday. I suppose that’s all I have to say for now. Life is ironic in the blackest yet sweetest way possible, simultaneously falling in and out of focus, beating in rhythm to steps on the sidewalk, mellifluous, muted and miles above our control.