Tuesday

One day it will be a Tuesday night, you’ll be in the shower, reaching for your shampoo and you won’t recognize your life.

The person you thought you would never stop loving has receded to the part of mind where pleasant, but hazy memories live, and maybe you’ll dust them off every so often, when you pass a stranger that has the same crooked smile.

Some of your friend’s lives look nothing like your own, and you wonder who left whom behind. Is it even a race? Of course it is, because you’re 20 years old and nothing has ever been done without your peers in the rearview mirror.

You’ll be struck with the absentminded melancholy of youth, the insipid kind that sneaks in and settles into the cracks of your bones when you start to count the years your life mattered. You will feel old even though you’re still hydrogen and helium and 2% some other stuff hanging out in a corner of the universe waiting to condense. Maybe you will get into bed and stare at the ceiling and think about the meeting you were supposed to go to or the errand you had to run and when did life just become a series of tasks when did it become like this where you can’t afford to disappear into your mind for hours because everyone will have left you behind.

It will be a Tuesday night and you’ll make yourself dinner and realize that for so long, while you were waiting for your life to start, the funny thing was,

it already had.