Are You There Journal, It’s Me, Erika: number five (Aging & Time)

Dear Journal,

In yesterday’s afternoon, I watched as a womxn walked ahead of me pushing her infant child in a stroller. She seemed weary, as most mothers of newborns and children of all ages are likely to be from time to time, or at a steady flow. My mind drifted to aging and the passing of time—which, for some unknown reason, I have pondered since the day I remember being an alive humxm; since I was a very little girl, I have thought of “time” and growing old, or older. 

This young mother is kind of at the beginning of her life and I am at the beginning of a new chapter of mine, if not in youth and promise—as defined by scholars and society. When I look at young and little humxns, I understand that they will only be as young as they are for only some time, and they too, if they get to live a long life, in this life, will grow old and then die. We all will. If we live long enough. 

I love, love, love watching documentaries or vintage movies or, as I used to often do back in the day, sit on the floor next to large bins in second hand shops looking through old postcards and photos from the 1930s or 1960s and ‘70s of families, friends, and lovers who have disappeared into time, into herhistory. I would wonder, who are these people and how did their personal and familial memories wind up in this vintage shop in Pasadena? Are their whole families and extended families all gone?

Of course those bygone photographs and postcard notes stuffed into dusty bins and the watching of young mothers pushing carriages and seeing how young Tippi Hedren was in The Birds (I watched it, finally, a few weeks ago) and how young the Donut Dollies and the soldiers they unselfishly and invisibly served during the Vietnam War (and during WWII & the Korean War) in the documentary I had watched recently cause me to think of my own life, how “time” presses down on me, insists itself upon us all, and my and my own family’s and loved one’s mortalities. We will all one day, be gone. Memories. And in a way or entirely, unknown. 

I just cannot stop thinking about all this. Aging and time.