Growing pains

I'm sure we've all heard this before. Once you hit thirty and make the mistake of not sleeping on a perfectly ergonomic mattress, your spine crumbles like ill-fitting puzzle pieces. Hangovers turn into a week-long affair. Don’t even get me started on your knees.

People talk about the complications of your body aging, but rarely do they prepare you for the complications that happen to your emotions.

When I was younger, complicated feelings amounted to a confusing crush on a girl with exceptionally muscly arms or a guy who didn't wash his hair often enough but made up for it by being wickedly funny.

I met a woman at a conference a few weeks ago; the context is not important; she was a random person who came to talk to me after a speaker workshop.

What stopped me in my tracks was her smile. For, you see, it wasn't just HER smile.

I was suddenly transported to a long-forgotten moment.

We were driving around with one of my closest friends at the time in his mom's beat-up Toyota. I kept putting a particular Florence and the Machines song on repeat, and, for some reason (or no reason at all), we ended up laughing about it so much that he had to pull over. After we finally caught our breaths, he looked over at me, smiled, and said something about being happy to have friends who make everything dumber. I responded, proclaiming he could always count on me to do just that.

The last time I saw him, apart from an occasional Facebook post tag, was before his uni finals. He didn't know how to tie a tie and called me, half-panicked, half-laughing, asking if I could look it up for him. By some miracle, I was in the area and rushed to help him tie it behind a random bus stop. He flashed me his crooked smile, and I watched his tall, lanky back disappear into the hungry maw of a public transport vehicle.

Nothing bad happened, you see. We just kind of drifted apart. Life got hectic, and our group of friends slowly ebbed and flowed. Beers turned into calls, calls turned into messages, messages turned into... forgetting.

The woman at the conference wore his smile with such ease as if she didn't just forcefully crack open my ribcage and my skull, ripping the long-buried memories out like atrophied nerve endings.

It was an odd kind of pain, deep and breath-taking but not unpleasant. Melancholy, you could call it.

With every passing year, our feelings get layered, fractured, drowned, and then somehow forcefully resurrected. People don facial features of relatives you dearly miss or kindergarten bullies you have forgotten about for three decades (hi Peter, if you're reading this, I STILL remember how you dunked a glass of water on my head back then).

Events rehash themselves like a high school play. The actors are different, and you might be unsure of where the ending is headed, but you find yourself mouthing along to some of the script lines you somehow memorized years ago.

Sometimes, it all sinks so deep into the gooey creases of your brain that all the complicated jagged edges have been smoothed by time so much they no longer scratch your throat as they tumble down into your heart.

I wanted to put everything I felt when I saw that stranger's smile into writing—pen a poignant short story about inside jokes, constellations with kooky names, and dreams the main characters left behind—but I can't.

It feels impossible to capture the tightness in my chest without physically reaching in, slapping a handful of bronchi on a table, and letting you all rifle through the gore. I'm sure there are actual writers who do more than an occasional Substack rant, who could make you feel every atom of that experience.

But I realized I don't necessarily have to bring it to life as a fiction piece.

I think a lot of us are going through these growing pains. This particular brand of them is never going to stop, I'm sure, and as masochistic as it's going to sound, I like that.

At least, I like it more than the ferocity of my back protesting about sleeping at a slightly odd angle.

I don't know if many people will read this; it's a bit of a departure from my usual content, but if you have any deliciously painful memories, I'd like to read about them. Maybe we'll become a part of each others' fondly remembered stories many years down the line.