More Will Go With Age

So tears came anyway. Grieving for he who I knew. Grieving for the many, many in the time to come who will go.

I can still feel the burn of teardrops that streamed down my face on that night in Freshman year. I was lamenting my own fate then. I felt it again today. I am mourning the passing of someone I knew now.

That was four years ago, also a Spring night. I scrolled past a Chinese quote as I ate dinner. The quote roughly translated to “I am scared that, even at the end, I may never catch up to the self onto which so much hope was placed.” I remember reading it again. The beef brisket was half-eaten because I had to pace down Alexander Walk for a club meeting.

Every blow of wind reminded me of the amount of solitude implicit in being in the streets where the only companions are lamp posts a regular shadow apart. Taylor Swift was singing through my headphones “They see right through me. Can you see right through me? They see right through me. I see right through me.”

I saw right through me. The caprice, pretension, contradictions. The hopes of my eager parents — there is so much they don’t know. The cluelessness about how to get there. The powerlessness about never being able to get there. That’s when it hit me.

But I didn’t let anyone see. Nobody was around. The street was dark: no amount of lamp posts could light my face nor my tears. I washed them off and blew my nose before entering the meeting room.

Four years older now. A part of the wisdom that comes with age is accepting. I can get over the fact that I might never catch up to the aspirations of my past. I’ve made peace with that. I thought I also made peace with death. I was wrong.

The email about his passing came during dinner today. On the walk down Alexander Walk to dance practice — the same path, four years later — images kept popping into my head. Inconsequential ones and impressions they were. A backpack slung low on one shoulder. A skateboard tucked under his arm. The way he talked about the VR club, the curriculum he wanted to build, his ambition to revive it. I don’t remember his voice exactly. I wish I did.

I didn’t want to cry — it felt like a self-important gesture, crossing a line of sorts, assuming the place of someone close to him. But even with this distance, for someone who I’ve simply admired from our simple interactions, I felt my defenses crumbling. Death broke the truce in a sly triumph.

So tears came anyway. Grieving for he who I knew. Grieving for the many many in the time to come who will go.

I had an inkling, when I paraded my peace with death, that it was an illusion propped up by distance. As it turns out, distance creates false comfort. I can justify this to myself by thinking that my armistice with death still stands generally, it’s just an element of regret that tipped the scale here: there is so much I hadn’t known, so much I’d wanted to know, so much I wish I knew. Maybe it’ll be different when the turn comes for someone who is older and closer to me. Or maybe I’ll be disillusioned again.

I started doing yoga to increase flexibility and aid digestion, but apparently it can also slow down aging, a process that I always dreaded. Rationally, yes, there is different scenery at every age. Yet the irrational fear of being weak, confused, and bald persists. Now there is one more reason. The hardest part of growing old, as I heard from a song, is that some people that you love don’t.

So I will age, enjoy the stages and seasons, even if only to appreciate the scenery for those who might never. And find a way to live with the fact that, despite sealed regrets and missed goodbyes, some people will stay young forever.