I have grown old today

It isn’t my birthday. It isn’t even a momentous day. It is a slow day in fact. I have had much time to walk around, lie down, watch passable movies and even have thoroughly uninteresting meals. I have had a few conversations that felt as good as a second or third smoke does with far too many shots consumed already. I thought of some wonderful things I will never make – I just thought of them because I can loll around in its weak shadow imagining I’m safe, I have things to look forward to, I have hope. I’ve grown old though. Much older than I ever felt, I think I’ve taught myself to be older. I am getting used to things. The pain is dulled. The heartache continues, burning everything in its way, blinding me from what lies around me, but I don’t have to pause anymore. I like it there, the glow that burns burns burns. Here, It once singed holes in my clothes, my tendons, my head. I cried unabashed to let it out.
It never goes. In this realization, I grew old. Wiser by a million years. I have woken up these past mornings and reached out for the bile with my tongue, ever so hopeful it left. Yet, finding it there wasn’t disappointing. It was just familiar.
However, as science may or may not prove in the future, I have firmly established a fact, maybe. No one grows in a straight line, up ahead at a uniform speed, from 1 to 5 to 20 to one-day-you-wake-up-and-you-are-too-old. My growth pattern, traced over probably important phases in my life which were irreversibly spent in a world much unrelated to my then-Present have led me to wonderful charts. I trace them all over my books, over important papers, over files, over stationeries and desks left unguarded with smiting pens of all colours. Everyone asks me what they are. I, very frankly tell them it is in a process of discovery. They always grow into wondrous things – dragons, horses, dogs, umberallas, woman’s face within an alligator’s… opening Rorschachian avenues to those who care. In the end though, there is no pattern and there is no line. These are hours spent veering dangerously all over my life span – 5 goes to 50 goes down to 3, goes up to 10, comes further up to 25 and then back to 3…the pain fluctuates too, with no rhyme. I have grown, and in seconds I am tearing away at my childhood, grappling just as poorly with things that scared me then.
I am vertiginous. I am dizzy. I poke my head into strangers' rooms and squint for similar traces.