Learning the Gray, by Jenny Bahn

I sit on the train in front of my $80 worth of groceries.  Two paper bags filled with the food of a neurotic Californian: organic Mache lettuce, reduced carb tortillas that taste like edible rubber, one of twenty cartons of soy milk I will go through this month.  Across from me stands a blonde boy with perfect skin and gray jeans.  He is twelve, thirteen maybe, talking to his friends about appetizers.  There is something about his face that keeps making me turn to him until I find myself strange and look away, towards my own weathered reflection in a grubby window between the subway cars.  Even in pieces, I can see where my face is starting to acquire deep grooves.  When I look back at him, he has noticed my staring and he probably thinks me to be odd; a crazy young woman on the verge of being a crazy old lady.  At that age, the difference between the two is nearly indecipherable.

It is strange when the chasm between you and the next generations become more remarkable.  There is just over a decade between this boy and I, and how different I feel yet so completely the same.  My aging body will continue to grow up around me and I will keep thinking how and why my insides will never match my outsides.  This boy looks at me as an entity I myself do not even associate with, in the same way I used to watch professional baseball players on television and think that they were Men.  I grew up only to realize that they were merely boys, fresh out of high school.  With age, comes perspective.

I am getting older.  For the first time, I can feel it.  That is not to say I feel more of an adult; I simply feel like I am beginning to look my age, that the wheels of biology have begun to spin beyond my control.  No matter what anyone tells you, aging is terrifying, because it is the symptom of my future disappearance.  The older I get, the closer I am to not being here anymore.  Death is no abstract thing.  It is not hidden or lied about.  It is there, around us, always.

Last night we watched the Oscars, played audience to Celine Dion’s singing and impassioned expressions, while a screen displayed black and white photographs of old people that weren’t here anymore.  None of them mattered to us and we let them go like pieces of confetti on a breeze, without thought or care or significance.  A whole life, gone.  And we just sat there, saying that the only worthwhile dead person in the bunch was Dennis Hopper.  And then we continued to chatter and eat our chips and dip and pretend that we would all live forever.

There are moments in which I recognize my mortality, often during instances of extreme enjoyment – a laugh that hurts my belly and brings me to tears, witnessing a personal moment between strangers, falling in love with someone new.  Most often, it is a song that will make me think about dying, not because it is a song about dying, but it is a song so good, so god damn beautiful, that I can’t imagine never hearing it again.  The chords, the lyrics, the beats.  How much a song can give you.  How accurately it can define you as a human being.  How strange it is that there is someone else out there that feels the world like you feel the world.  One day I won’t be here to listen to it, and the thought fills me with utter sadness.

Time continues with utter disregard for my fears.  Gravity and free-radicals and the passing years brand me with their scars, call me an “Adult.”  I am nearly twenty-seven.  I graduated high school nearly a decade ago.  I have been paying my rent for just less time than that.  I pay my own health insurance in quarterly installments.  I have lived with a boy for two years.  I have hosted dinner parties with melon-wrapped prosciutto and made fig jam with fruit from the backyard.  I have been to Paris and London and cities in Italy.  I can eat dinner by myself, go to concerts by myself, sit in movie theaters by myself.  I am allowed to own credit cards and sign leases and rent cars.  This is not because I am an adult; this is just because the years have afforded such experiences.  I do not feel old; I feel like an imposter.

The Younger Me would ask why I wasn’t married, why I didn’t have kids, why I didn’t wear pencil skirts and report to a job with a boss that I hated.  She would ask why I still went by Jenny and not Jennifer.  She would say didn’t I know I had to grow up one day and I would hold her small hands with longer fingers than palm and I would say, “Jenny, there is no such thing.  There is no growing up.  Inside, there is no up or down.  Your life will be only forwards or backwards, sideways or stalling.  You learn things and you keep going and you look back at your life moving so fast behind you, so incredibly fast, the past becoming more distant in the rearview mirror with each passing year but not feeling any more of an adult than when you did at nineteen.”  You tell her she will feel like her for the rest of her life.

The Younger Me, of course, would not believe any of this.  She would not understand because she would be too young to grasp such concepts that required a scope beyond her emotional and intellectual capabilities.  The Younger Me would stand on this train, side by side with this boy with his blonde hair – the two of them an army against me, not understanding we were all just the same, that despite the creases on my forehead and the groceries I just purchased for myself, I felt just as they did, free and lost, though increasingly less careless.  They would stare at my face, a face they thought looked old and sad, and I would know that they were only able to see the world in black and white.  But they will learn the gray, yes, they will learn the gray.

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