age is just a number

By the time you were seven years old, it didn't matter that the blonde-haired rascal of a boy who was your best friend during those golden wheat summers was also nearly twelve. After all, age was just a number, and the numbers that mattered most were things like who could climb more trees, or who could pick more ripened apples from the ground, or who could save more worms on a day whose clouds were bogged down with rainwater. By the time you were seven years old, your limbs were younger than an acorns', and you were just a little girl. A doll-child little girl, careless in a world of numbers.

By the time you were eleven, long-limbed and awkward and half-done with innocence, you'd grown out of those pink-petal cheeks and toothy smiles and thin curls of limp blonde hair. What mattered was the weary, restless grey area you were in: no longer a golden endless summer, but a world that seemed endlessly bogged down by rainclouds that used to drown the worms. He'd show up at your front door less and less, no longer bringing with him goosefeather-grey skipping rocks or a scoundrel smile but sometimes an awkward, lonely vacancy upon his freckled face, until one day he just didn't show up anymore. You took it hard: but it was okay, after a while. Time dulls old wounds, and you realized that age wasn't just a number, but a code.

A code: a code that, by thirteen, you were fully ready to accept. Suddenly, the two-year gap between you and your younger brother was ageless, timeless, solid as stone. With thirteen came responsibility and makeup and the painful cold knife-slice of air that accompanies you to the surface of the play of seventh grade, the play that you were suddenly an actor in. He was an actor too: high up in the awe that came with age, the ripening of responsibility and the shine and gleam of objectivity. You missed him, of course, but age would never permit you to talk to him---so you suffered your thirteen-year-old heartbreak in miserable silence, a silence that seemed foreverless to your fragile soul.

The code didn't leave by seventeen: age, by now, it had become a weary rutted street that everyone travelled by, day by day the same. Age was a combination to a lock you couldn't open: a prison number in black-and-white writing that you couldn't escape. Ohonefive. Ohfourseven. It was a sentence by society: each digit was, in mathematical painful clarity, your life. Each numbered door was a possible plea to happiness, each dial of a number into your phone a fleeting chance at love. Each hope was shot down, year after year; you'd have to serve your sentence, mechanically, desperately, lost, when you were seventeen.

When you were five, you thought by ten you'd have a horse and a house and your freedom: when you were fifteen, you dreamed desperately that you'd be in true and irrevocable love before you were twenty. Polite society would never allow your true happiness, and you cried and you cried at the unfairness of the blonde-haired boy as he went off to college and left you for dust. Blooming with importance, and setting sail on seemingly tranquil seas, he left you for a penny and a peach, stowed away in his briefcase to remind him of his once golden summer home. Slowly, you became twenty and twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three. The minute hand on your lips fell in lurches, and you floated listlessly in a sea of dreams.

You teetered there, on the border of lost memories and unattainable dreams, with one foot tipped forward from the hopscotch court and one foot slipped back away from the document with the 'X' and the dotted line.

Time passed. There were many, many numbers. There were numbers of down payments and numbers of faceless dates and numbers upon numbers of times you called him and hung up before you heard his voice. The clock was a balance weight on your heart, and age was always looming behind you, pushing you over the edge.

But by the time you were ninety-nine, you had almost seen one century and could see it all from your back porch. You swung and dreamed, dreamed and swung, and he held your bluish, creased hand, smiling away with that rascal grin. You had turned as cornflower grey as the rolling clouds that were so bogged down with rainwater, and as parchment-thin as the worms seeking shelter from the flood. But in your heart were ages, ages and calendar pages, and he had seen them all. The ones he'd missed didn't matter, because you were thirteen, and seventeen, and hopeless and teenaged and lost. His hair wasn't quite as blonde as it once was, it'd turned salt-white before the birth of your first granddaughter, but you could still see the youth in his freckles and saltwater eyes. You could get lost in those eyes, you thought, those ageless eyes that had seen a century of golden wheat-filled summers, because soon you had both realized once more that age was, in fact, just a number after all.