First of all, I should apologize to my younger readers. You're probably not going to get this story. That's okay; you will one day. You might get it sooner than I did, or later than I did, but one of these days this will be you, and you, like me, will suddenly be thankful that you're older.
Oh, you old guys? You're going to love this one.
“Being Thirty”
Aaron Matthew Smith- 09 April 2013
I didn’t care that it was Saturday. I didn’t want to get
out of bed. It wasn’t as if I’d had a rough night the night before, either.
Yeah, it was my birthday, but I’d only had a few friends over. We’d watched a
movie. I drank two beers. They were all gone by ten-thirty, and I was in bed my
eleven.
I glanced at the clock. Seven-thirty-nine. Only a little
later than I’d have slept on a work day.
Well, no sense wasting the day. I dragged myself out of
bed and groaned as I stood upright. What had I done to make my back hurt so
badly?
Nothing. I’d done literally
nothing the day before. I’d hurt it in my sleep. I’d laid still for eight hours
and managed to hurt myself.
I limped into the bathroom and stared at myself in the
darkened bathroom mirror. Dark bangs hung beneath both eyes like I’d lost a
fistfight the night before.
God, I was so
thirty. I was thirty, and my life was over.
I just wanted to go back to bed. Lay there until my life
started running in reverse, let me do my young years over again. If I laid
there long enough it was bound to happen.
No, maybe if I played Nintendo. The last time I played
it I was about thirteen. That was bound to jumpstart the aging-down process. Or
called up some friends from high school that I hadn’t spoken to in ten years.
The trouble, of course, would be finding one without a child to wake up this
early in the morning.
Crap. This day
sucks, I thought, plopping down on my bed and making my back and neck
twinge with pain in the process. And every day after this one is going to
suck, too.
Oh, crap. I had to go to the mall and buy pants today.
I’d been putting it off for weeks until finally I had no pants in good enough
condition to wear to work anymore. I wasn’t even sure they’d let me back in the
mall. I wondered if there was some kind of old man store that I had to go to
now, where all they sold were Velcro shoes and blue jeans with no texture
whatsoever. Well, might as well get it over with.
I dressed myself and made a pot of coffee the size of a
bathtub. I ate oat bran for breakfast. Then I headed to the mall.
One of the positive side effects of being old, I thought
as I pulled into the nearly-empty mall parking lot, is that I’m already up
before everyone else. I parked in a spot near the front doors and walked in the
main mall thoroughfare.
The tile floor gleamed in the morning sunlight filtering
through the skylights in the mall’s roof, potted ferns and palm trees my only
company as I strolled past two women’s clothing stores and one store that only
sold high-priced athletic underwear. At the main crossroads in the middle of
the shopping mall a water featured gurgled peacefully, pennies at the bottom of
the shallow well catching the morning light.
I smelled coffee, and even though I’d already had enough
to power a nuclear submarine I craved another cup. That must’ve been an ability
I acquired upon getting old; the ability to imbibe coffee from daylight til
dark without stopping. Eh, there were worse super powers.
I turned the corner and groaned audibly as the coffee
kiosk came into view. Just what I needed today- huddled at the counter were
four teenagers, two boys and two girls (they always seemed to move in packs of
exactly that arrangement), pointing at the menu and talking to loudly to the
poor barista that they were practically shouting his apron off. Another girl in
a black polo shirt farther down the line was pouring syrups from four different
bottles into a huge plastic cup.
They seemed to smell my hesitation as I approached, each
turning to look at me and whisper to their friends in turn.
Crap, this was just perfect. As if I needed something
else to make me feel older than dirt…
But then something clicked in my brain, and it was like
the last piece in a puzzle falling into place so that you can finally see the
completed image after a lifetime of seeing it unfinished.
I didn’t care.
I truly, honestly didn’t care. No part of me, no fiber
of my being gave two rat’s tails what these kids thought about me. I didn't care that they thought I was old; heck, I already knew I was old.
The amount I
didn’t care was almost startling, in
fact. One by one the kids glanced at me before giggling and turning back to
their coffee-milkshakes and their friends. Only then did I realize I’d been
grinning like the clown from It at
them.
And you know what? I didn’t care about that either.
I kept grinning as I approached the barista, who looked
supremely thankful that the teenagers had taken their drinks and were wandering
in a pack toward a store with flashing neon tube lighting in the window.
“You get that a lot?” I asked the young man, who was
readjusting his black-framed glasses on his nose. I told him my order, large
black coffee to go.
“All the time, man,” he said. He sighed.
“Don’t sweat it,” I assured him. “It gets better.”
“Easy for you to say,” he said.
I couldn’t keep from smiling as I took a cup from him. “Yes.
Yes it is.”
I fairly skipped toward the boring-looking men’s
clothing store.
