Around my 25th birthday, my hairdresser announced that she found a gray hair on the back of my head. I was horrified. 25?? Really?? I shrugged it off and told her it was probably a blonde hair. She pulled it out.
When I was 27 1/2 years old, she laughed again and said, "oh I found another one!" I insisted it was one of my bleached hairs in my streak.
At 28 years and 3 months, reality hit me like a hurricane. As I looked in the mirror I saw something glisten. I looked closer at the front of my head, trying hard to separate the individual strands of hair. It was there, mocking me, a single silver hair. It was half the length of the rest. It had just grown in, independently free, without a care and full of confidence. It said to me, "Ha! my friend Time brought me. Hello. I'm not going anywhere".
As the years pass, we sometimes don't realize what's happening to us. We're caught in the middle of work and bills and life that we sometimes forget that we're getting older. Then one day we step back and see ourselves outside of our bodies, as people we see on the street. You know how when you have to describe someone you say, "...a lady who's about 40 years old, with the short brown hair". I don't think of myself as 28 years old, I'm Natasha. I've been the same person. But now I'm the lady who's almost 30 with green eyes and blonde streaks in her hair. Someone younger than me is describing me like that. Someone younger than me thinks I'm old!
We hear a click in our knees and we say, "oh I've been working out too much. I think I pulled something" when in reality, it's just us getting old. No one really tells you what it feels like. Things just happen to us and we adjust and take them to be what they are. I have gray hair, I get tired at a bar at 10pm, my knees are stiff when I sit too long, I'm getting older. Then I think, I remember when I was 5 years old. I remember standing in the stairwell with my Minnie Mouse sweatshirt waving goodbye to my mother. It can't be that long ago! That was 1990. And it seems like it was yesterday. You know, the 90's....that was over 20 years ago! That's insane. We've traded places with our parents, the people we used to roll our eyes at and say, "you were young like 20 years ago! You have no idea what life is like now!"
I don't feel like I'm old. I don't feel like I've done all the things I'm supposed to do. And now I realize why some people don't act their age, because they haven't really realized their age yet. We condemn people who are in their 40's and still acting like they're 25. We scoff when we hear that people are dating someone 20 years younger than they are. But it makes sense. George Clooney makes sense now. Time passes so fast that we sometimes miss our real age. One year just blurs into another at some point and it's all the same. It's all one continuous day, and we just live it.
