The Fear and The Confidence
A Shorty to Me Turning Forty
Aging is an extraordinary process where you become the person you always should have been.
-David Bowie
I turn 40 today.
I’ve been in this body for 40 years and really I don’t have much to say about it. I feel the same as I felt yesterday and really not much different than I felt a year ago and beyond. I’ve loved it and hated it, inside and out. I have had so many incredibly joyous moments in my life as well as the difficult and heart-crushingly painful but, ultimately, I am happy.
Content.
At total peace with who I am and continue to be as a human.
And that is everything.
I don’t really understand the inherent way we are programmed to sort of brace for entering into a new decade of age but I do feel it every time.
Oh, dirty 30, aayyyyy, that’s a big one, amiright?!
40 this year?! Are you going to have a party? That’s one to celebrate!!
The big 5-0?! Who’d have ever thought, huh!?
I remember it at 30, or on the eve of it or whatever. Is this going to really feel different? It didn’t. And now, thinking back, around 38 I started realizing I could now see the pinhole light of 40 approaching. What’s that going to feel like? Is it going to feel different? Is that old? I sure don’t feel old. I think I feel more authentically myself and alive than ever before actually..
I used to spend a lot of time running around in the woods behind my parents house when I was a kid. I would walk back through the trees to a fishing hole I liked a lot. I would hike up the ridge in search of deer. And I would build forts out of fallen tree branches. The wind would cascade off my body, cooling my sweat, as I rode my mountain bike back the dirt road that led to an abandoned house.
Sometimes I would be with friends or siblings, other times on my own. We would dare each other to go into the house alone. It was dilapidated. This place felt like a place where something bad had gone down. I don’t know that to be true at all, it was just the vibe. It was mysteriously creepy and it seemed as though whoever was living there last just vanished. The place was pretty torn up by the time I discovered it around the age of 12, mid 90’s. Dishes dumped from cabinets and broken on the floor, furniture slashed and torn apart upside down, newspapers and magazines, all dating from the 1970’s indicating it had been vacant at least 25 years, a toilet outside in large pieces, thrown from a second story window.
I used to ride back there alone and explore, hoping I’d find some sort of clue as to what really happened back here. I would bring a backpack with a pencil, writing paper and a drawing pad and I would “collect evidence” and write stories about the place. Mostly murder mysteries. Sometimes alien abduction. I would write about the imagined, tragic life this house once held that lead to its now gutted belly. I was trying to write out drama before I ever had the life experience to understand what it was. How intricate it can be. The house isn’t there at all any more. Someone came along, tore it down and hauled it away years ago.
Who knew, all these years later, that area and much of the area nearby would be a crime scene, a murder crime scene. Now in the woods where I played there are body parts strewn about. Some in the house of the murderer, some in his fire pit, some down by the creek, some up the ridge, some that will likely never be recovered. Some teeth and flesh bits fallen down between a deep rock crevice. A pinky finger, carried off by a fox in the night and dropped far away, unable to be sniffed out and collected. Some parts will remain until they are dust and become part of something else entirely.