Old
i will not claim this word
I am not old. Old is the oak tree in my front yard, in its place so long nobody remembers a time without it. Old is the ocean, the stars, the forests. Old is when you don’t have the numbers to put an age on something. Old is not for humans.
I am 59. I am not old. I will not be old when I’m 89. Old is the earth one digs up when hunting for ancient bones. Old is for museum pieces, for civilizations lost.
When I was younger I thought I didn’t want to be old. And now that I’m aging, I still don’t want to be old. I don’t want to be thought of as an artifact of another time. I am not to be looked at as someone past their prime, someone who can’t start something new, embark on adventures, discover just who I am. You don’t have to be in your 20s or 30s to do those things.
Sure, old is the opposite of young. What else would you call a person approaching retirement age or one who has gone beyond that? But old subtly implies a frailness, a weakness. We are not fragile, we are not made of glass that will shatter on impact. We are not remnants of another age that will turn to dust if you handle us roughly. We are not old.
There are those who want to claim the world old, who want to embrace it just to shove it back in the faces of those who use it against us. We are aging but we are writing books and starting businesses and creating music, we are living and loving and thriving. I don’t want to claim the word, I want to defy it at every turn.
We are not old. Old is for heavenly bodies and ancient scriptures. We can look at things that are old and marvel at them, gaze upon them in wonder and awe, amazed that they are still intact, still exist. Please do not look at me like that. I am not a dinosaur fossil. I am not mummified remains from a burial site. I am a person, a living, breathing human being who will not conform to your idea of old. Not now, not at 80.
I do not want to lay claim to that word. That would be giving in. It would be a death knell, an end of things. To say I am old would be to say I am ready to cross some imaginary finish line. I am not here for that, not yet, not ever. I am not willing to be thought of as done, for I feel like I am just starting out in some ways. I still have words to write and music to listen to, places to visit, and people to meet. In a lot of ways, I am new, I am young. Old is for ruins, for books that turn to dust when you run your hand over them. I will not claim your word. I am not old.