How do we mourn our own lives?

In our youth, the future is a wild frontier, unknown and vast

On a Sunday stroll a few weeks ago, I walked to the front door of my old house without any conscious intention to go that way. The house, a 3-bedroom South Philly rowhome that I rented with roommates from 2005-2008, is in roughly the same neighborhood I live in now, about twelve minutes away by foot from my current front door—but in all the walks I’ve taken in recent memory, I’ve never ended up near its entryway, or even on the same block.

Why now?

Compared to the time spent in the many places I’ve lived, my occupancy in this row home was brief—three years. Stacked up against the seven years in the apartment I moved into in 2009 with my then-boyfriend and now-husband, or the seven in the house I live in currently, or especially the thirteen years in the house I grew up in, three years seems trivial. Yet, a pang of nostalgia pulled me towards this place I lived with dear friends when we were young, and I found myself there, standing in front of it—the tree near the entryway, which had been a sapling when I’d moved out, now towering above me.

Once I arrived at the stoop, I didn’t stay long. Rather than sitting with the awe of how I’d accidentally wandered there, or unpacking the feelings that came up, I simply offered a head-nod and meandered off with an eerie vacancy, a bit like I’d taken a Benadryl. I stopped at CVS before going home. It was anti-climactic.

It was only later that I was properly taken aback by the fact that I had ended up there at all, or that I wrestled with how odd it was that I’d done so in a semi-subdued trance, almost anesthetized, half-aware where I was going. Weirdly, I’d let my subconscious do the driving. Millions visit historical sites like the Pantheon each year in hopes the past can teach them something about the present. I think my subcortex wanted the same: It led me to this altar, and all I could muster was to blink and shuffle away, back towards home.

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On Saturday, the night before I ended up at my old house, I’d shared an Uber with friends through center city Philly, down one of many streets lined with bars and restaurants. At 10PM, we were headed home, happily exhausted from a long day out. My fellow passengers and I are of a wearier age so our evening was ending just as the throngs of energetic 20-somethings were beginning their nighttime adventures, stumbling out of their own rideshares to continue or start their revelry, all of them splayed before us in the ecstasy of youth.

Stopped at a light, we watched from our Uber as one fivesome sloppily erupted from a compact car that was far too small to hold them: A group of girls around 21 or 22, all of them wearing nearly identical outfits—black crop-tops with 90’s-style baggy light-wash jeans and white sneakers, a distorted homage to a decade they never experienced, filtered through the prism of the past twenty years, a simulacrum of what we actually wore back then. (An enterprising sort could easily package their exact apparel as a flammable costume at Halloween Adventure with the label “90’s Girl”—it’s not quite right, but at a glance, you get the gist.)

The fivesome’s vehicle was insufficient, not only for their corporeal forms, but also to contain the heat of their energy and the depth of their enthusiasm; it was like the classic carnival stunt where a hundred clowns climb out ceaselessly from a tiny toy-car. Unbothered by their cramped ride, the group spilled onto the pavement, drinks in hands, gleefully yelling nonsense to each other, giggling and bellowing as they traipsed towards their next stop, some of them locking hands as they disappeared around a corner, the echoes of their chatter trailing them in the dark. Rapt, I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

Watching the fivesome from the safe confines of an SUV, my friends and I laughed knowingly. In our youths, we too had all been drunk at times, out with our similarly-dressed pals, loudly announcing ourselves as we swayed and staggered across the breadth of a city block. With half-derision, half-appreciation, we all offered light commentary, “Oh damn, those girls are DRUNK,” “Yikes, they’re in for a rough morning,” and “They can’t be a day over 21, can they? Aw. They’re BABIES.” The light changed, we drove off, and the conversation switched to something else.

The next day, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fivesome—I still haven’t. Those girls, alight with abandon, still in the first act of the mystery of their lives, were ghosts flickering in the road, phantoms of a life I’ve already lived. And observing them in the prime of their spectacular freedom, it hit me:

I’ve already survived the only youth I’ll ever get.

It’s over. Forever.

Sure, as a fact, it’s obvious—hardly a revelation. But until now, I’d never thought about it in terms so stark and true: I’ll never, ever be young again.

And ever since, the grief has been washing over me in waves. What to do with it, how to metabolize the loss?

For all my years of introspection, I’ve not ever grappled with this particular conundrum: How do we mourn ourselves? How do we grieve our own lives?

I’m learning as I go.

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In July, I’ll turn forty. As the dreaded date looms, approaching like a deadline, I’ve been wrestling with the usual almost-mid-life stuff—angst that I haven’t accomplished everything I thought I would have by now; ruminations on what a fulfilling life looks like; hand-wringing over what it means to be a good person, a responsible citizen, a loving friend, a supportive partner (and reflecting on how I measure up or fall short); grand plans for changes I’d like to make and habits I want to cultivate; a reckoning around how I spend my days; an ever-present uncertainty about work, finances, and bills, and keeping my body in a strong enough state to carry me through to the end.

And there’s the constant fury caused by our consuming dystopia: Fear of our free-fall into fascism, the earth scorching humanity to death as punishment for its prolonged hubris, a misinformation ecosystem that pillories women (even more so if they’re Black or brown), flattens debate, and radicalizes white supremacist terrorists into mass-murder. Believe it or not, all of this horror, while pre-occupying and infuriating, are the more manageable parts of getting older, because I’ve habituated to it. Self-reflection of this flavor is already hardwired into the script of my inner monologue, and while it’s heightened now as I inch towards July, it’s largely business as usual.

Anxiety is my baseline. I can (mostly) deal with the discomfort.

What I don’t know how to cope with is the longing. It blindsided me. As I’m parsing what is workable about this impending birthday and what is harder, I’m realizing that the toughest part is the yearning for an earlier version of myself—the glorious me that had no idea what lay ahead.

Sure, I expected vanity about wrinkles and body-image, and complicated feelings about what the hell I’m doing with my life, as well as having to continue to deal with the hollowing pain of being a woman in a culture steeped in misogyny. But gnawing heartache for a younger, messier, untamed me? Chasing the high of pure uncertainty—that’s been a twist.

Although, I really should have seen it coming.

While many fear the unknown, it’s always been a balm to me (which is odd considering I’m host to several co-morbid anxiety disorders). Counterintuitive as it may be, as a twenty-something, I remember clearly how comforted I was by the limitless possibilities of an approaching adult life.

I miss it—the soaring ache for the future—a wild frontier, vast and sprawling, just crying to be conquered. I was impatient for it all. Whatever “it” was going to be, I couldn’t wait.

Some may find this at odds with how I’ve packaged myself over the years. I’ve often hidden my earnest, plucky faith in happy endings. As a punky teen and young adult—no matter how cynical an affect I presented, or how many surly observations I had about the futility of it all, delivered deadpan through cigarette smoke—I always held a secret optimism, incandescent in my chest, (like Tony Stark’s arc reactor), and it sustained me, even on my darkest days. No matter how shitty the present moment, there was always the promise of infinite tomorrows to set things right.

Maybe that’s why I watched Annie approximately a thousand times as a kid—she clutched the thought of ‘tomorrow’ as a talisman. And she was rewarded for it. More and more, I feel orphaned from that undiluted hope, the soft comfort of the careening expanse that lay ahead.

Still, I’m not old. There’s plenty of people who’d call me young and are probably rolling their eyes as they read this. Yes, many decades do lie ahead (knock on wood), and, despite the state of the world, I’m excited about all that’s yet to come. But the hope is muted. And I pine for the less diluted version—the pure stuff that hasn’t been all mucked up by maturity. The anticipation I’ve got today is asterisked, heavy with caveats earned through experience, and dimmed by an ever-increasing awareness of life’s expiration date.

My body knows something’s up too. I’m more physically aware of the fact of life’s finality than ever before: I sense it in my marrow, and in my limbs that crack, and my back that slacks in its chair. With each creak and groan of eroding bone, what was thrumming in the background at a low volume has now crescendoed into symphonic clatter in my brain, shouting this paradox at me: You’ve still got plenty of time AND time is running out at a quickening pace. This leads to the equally at-odds, warring instincts to both “hurry!!!” to get more done before it’s all over and to “stop!!!” and sit in the present moment, to enjoy today before it’s all passed me by. C’est la vie.

While I’m constantly sorting out whether to sit still or sprint, this newly embodied understanding that my tomorrows are limited, perhaps still plentiful, but waning with every sunset—sadness is part of the sweeping orchestral background score, lulling me back into introspection.

And my thoughts keep coming back to this: How can I recapture a more potent version of that early-life hope, how can I get my hands on the good stuff?

—

In life, there’s only a brief period where youth overlaps with freedom (and many don’t have the privilege to experience that overlap at all). I was lucky. The three years I lived in the rowhome I walked to three Sundays ago were right in the sweet spot: I was in my early twenties, I’d just moved back to Philly, I no longer had to balance college classes with restaurant shifts, and I was living with my childhood best friends in an affordable house three times the size of any of my college apartments in Boston.

Rather than pressure myself to get started on my “career,” I was working full-time as a cocktail waitress in a bar downtown. The hours were long and punishing. I didn’t get home until the wee hours of the morning, and I was always broke—but I didn’t have to be at work until 3:30PM on weekdays, and I had weekends off to delight in the company of my friends.

My goals of being a writer, thoughts of financial freedom or responsibility, any planning or working towards the things I wanted for my life—I told myself it could all wait. I was living 100% for the moment, but only because I knew deep down how much tomorrow I had to waste. There was so much future, I was drowning in it, wealthy with the ability to squander weeks and years on living for today.

Looking back, I sometimes wish I hadn’t wasted so much time. I deluded myself that I’d write in my off-hours but I never seemed to have any energy for creative pursuits in the fleeting downtime between 12-hour bar shifts. It wasn’t until 2010 that I had the wherewithal to quit that hospitality job and start working towards anything else. I’d moved out of the old rowhome by then, and being a cocktail waitress had lost its shine. What I’d once seen as a job that allowed flexibility to pursue my dreams, I now realized was exploitative, depleting all my energy, and holding me back (all symptoms of industry-wide issues, not specific to this particular joint, which as far as restaurants go, was an OK-ish place to work with co-workers I loved, and I ended up picking up part-time work there again a few years later, this time in the office, during an interim between white-collar jobs).

It’s important to remember that it wasn’t all fun and freedom. Life was often hard and disappointing. It’s a human instinct to yearn for some halcyon past that we falsely glorify. But this idyllic place of memory does not exist—it’s a mirage projected by our current desires. And I’m sure that projection is informing my grief. The years spent in that rowhome were not unmarred by angst and burden. I was not some weightless nymph flitting through the forest fancy-free.

But that wild feeling that was pulsing through me then, the feeling you get in the first part of a gripping story, I can still conjure it, and I know it was real. And maybe the path forward is by summoning it more often. Perhaps I can grieve by reconnecting with that feeling—the freeing, soaring, high-note of belief in tomorrow’s promise.

I’ve been trying. Over the past year, I’ve been re-thinking what I want my life to be and there are moments when I feel it again, the sensation that everything is possible.

I think that’s the string the pulled me there, to that rowhouse where I spent so many nights being young with my friends. My mind-body wanted me to remember how I was, and to tell me I can be that way again, to offer me comfort, to reconnect me with the rugged pull of the unknown, to remind me: There is a well of howling energy to harness within, a well I wasted once and shouldn’t again.

So how can I invite that feeling? How can I work more constructively with it this time? How can I make sure I don’t squander that untamed vigor like I did once before?

Maybe it involves taking more risks. For all the hope of young Amy, she was always so afraid of rejection, not wanting to do anything unless she could do it perfectly. She chose avoidance. If she didn’t try, she couldn’t fail. She could hoard and preserve the pure elixir of faith-in-the-future without putting herself on the line, not wasting a drop. That’s partly why she slung drinks for most of her twenties without writing a word.

Now, what if I allowed myself to hope with the same abandon as her, but applied the benefit of accrued experience and even extracted something useful out of my encroaching world-weariness? There’s a thought that gives my hope some bounce.

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As I think back on the time I lived in that house, an image keeps resurfacing. It’s not a memory exactly so much as an amalgam of so many memories—a mash-up.

In the image, I am 23 years old, in the kitchen, the common area where we hung out so many nights listening to music on a crappy CD player plugged in on the counter, right near the door to the tiny concrete patio where we’d dip out to smoke cigarettes, not caring that they might kill us. We knew we’d die someday. But we didn’t believe it. Knowledge and belief are two different things.

I imagine this mash-up version of myself as viewed through the front window of the house, the spot where I stood three Sundays ago. Peering through the glass, I see that I’m dancing. Or rather, I’m twirling to the beat of a Daddy Yankee song we used to listen to on repeat, “Gasolina.” The song has an addictive, rhythmic repeat of the lyrics, “Dame más gasolina,” (“give me more gasoline” in English, a lyric many thought had a deeper meaning but the artist has clarified is “completely literal”), and my foot catches every down-beat, as I use my toe as leverage on the linoleum floor to push me faster around in a circle, my hands outstretched at my sides like propellers.

As I spin around the kitchen, enhaloed in the rapture of youth, singing along with the lyrics, I’m so sure of how much future there is waiting for me that I can be greedy about living with extra abandon right now. My body is loose, joints fluid, cheeks flushed. The music is so loud, it’s dizzying. I’m elated. There’s the same buzzy feeling in my synapses that the first few sips of a glass of wine can bring—a creeping lightness that feels like excitement, like possibilities, like anything can happen. And I want more of the feeling. Give me more.

Watching her/me twirl—so miraculous and unencumbered, I think, “God, I miss her. I miss her so much it aches.” What I wouldn’t give to twirl alongside her one more time, so light on her feet, illuminated with hope, unaware of the flame that’s ever-so-slowly dwindling into embers.

Then, she catches my eye through the window and holds out her hand. Smiling, she’s beckoning me to join her. And I realize, of course I can. Of course I will. All I have to do is choose.