It was a great weekend I just spent in Cape Cod, and for the entirety of it my body felt like feces incarnate. I hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since last Tuesday, my heart was racing at the slightest exertion, I was feeling dizzy from dehydration, I was feeling acid reflux to the point that I barely had space in my lungs to breathe - space which would only reveal itself when I burped incessantly for minutes at a time, and my back felt such searing violin pain after a twenty-minute wedding gig and an hour practice beforehand that I could barely pick the lightest things up in my right hand.
No thirty-one year old is supposed to feel like this - even for an overweight thirty-one year old with a history of severe overeating, moderate drinking, and light smoking, this must be too much. Something feels very wrong, I know that I’m supposedly young enough to correct it, but this is physical decline on a level which nobody my age ever seems to feel. I wonder if other people my age would feel the same way if they lived the way I live, and I often think they wouldn’t. I did myself no favors over my twenties with the way I deliberately put myself out of shape, but I find it hard to believe that even this level of physical neglect is enough to explain the way I felt. It literally felt as though I was watching my body shut down. And every time I partook in another gorgeous meal, another party drink, or even the two cigarettes I smoked, I felt like I was grasping rather pathetically at the good times such experiences used to give me - paying for convincing myself I was still young by feeling ancient. Even in my physical decrepitude, the times felt as good as ever, but I’ve paid for all those good times of my twenties by being prematurely middle aged, and like all middle-agers, every time I partake in a youthful pleasure I silently brace myself for the small but very real possibility that this will be the time I’m made to pay permanently for pretending to still be young.
And yet this evening I went for my first bikeride since returning, and somehow found the strength to bike all the way to Greektown via Downtown with a few laps around Patterson Park and back to my apartment. I would guess that I logged a distance fairly close to thirty miles, and it was probably the longest distance I’ve ever biked. I certainly felt winded at times, but rarely so much that I had to stop on even the most strenuous hills. Idiot that I am, I even stopped at a cafe in the middle of Greektown to reward myself with a small cup of ice cream. The man at the counter gave me a huge helping, and when I told him it was too big he joked that I looked like the kind of guy who wouldn’t be satisfied with a small helping. His pot belly was even fatter than mine, so I laughed in the kind of solidarity which only two fat people can have with one another and left him a dollar extra for tip. I then ate more than half of the ice cream, saying to myself all the way through ‘you can throw this away at any point.’
I’ve looked and acted older than my age from virtually the time I learned to speak. Was it genetics? Natural precocity? The disproportionate amount of time I spent with elderly people (for a variety of reasons, no kid spent more…)? The ‘antiqueness’ of my interests? The strain of mental illness? A combination of all of the above or some other factor gone unseen?
What I do know is that as I grow ever so slightly older chronologically, I suddenly find myself craving youthful feeling for the first time in my life. Heavy things which I used to consume on a daily basis - red meat, alcohol, long magazine articles, Mahler - now give me anxiety. I want to feel lighter, younger, less weightiness, more enjoyment. In nearly every way, I think I’ve become about as substantial as I ever care to be, and I need to seriously lighten up.
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