An Ode to Wrinkles

I have aged this morning. Or what I mean to say is: when I looked at myself in the mirror, under the early lights of dawn (the artificial light of my windowless bathroom at 11:34am), I noticed the bags under my eyes weighed down from carrying sleep, and the wrinkles at their edges still leaking with laughter. I had never pictured my life past the age of twenty one, whether due to some disorder or lack of imagination, my brain only made it as far as the legal drinking age in the United States—and I stopped drinking by the time I was twenty three. Only now at twenty seven, have I come to imagine what my life past thirty would look like. 

My father died at thirty four; leaving behind a wife, a home, three sons, and a daughter. They tell me I look just like him—his stepsister once broke down in tears upon seeing me for the first time in a few years when I was seventeen. I only know him in photos and side profiles; I once unknowingly got the same mullet as him right after my university graduation when I fried all my hair off with bleach. I see the parallels in the mirror; his crooked nose, his plastering of freckles over pale skin, his light hair atop a big head. 

We’re told that to age is a privilege–that life is an uncertain thing where nothing is guaranteed, and we don’t know what the future may bring. But, I know that fine lines will deepen and grey hairs will multiply. I know that in my fifties my neck muscles will loosen in the same way it did for Abuelo and Tata and Mami. I know that eventually, gravity will humble and come for us all–which is why Abuela tells me I need to put more effort into wearing better supporting bras. 

I’m not sure what I’ll look like when I’m thirty four, or fourty two, or sixty nine, or seventy four, or maybe even a hundred and three. But I know that if I do get there, my face would be a version of what my father’s face might have looked like. It's a wonder, this, to finally have a face I can start placing into future versions of me–even if that me already exists within the cyclicality of time. A face to serve as a portal both through the past and into the future.

I don’t normally make goals or cast wishes–I was raised to believe that God’s plan is greater than our want. I wonder, still, if the God I grew up with listens–knows our fears and our hopes. Abuela, stricken with cancer, prayed so hard for a granddaughter (at the time all she had were two grandsons, my brothers) that seven came back-to-back, right after she went into remission. My father, who wanted so deeply to know all the family he hadn’t had, met his half-brother and then his lost half-sister, who one random day called and asked if he’d want to come up to Boston to meet her and his mother, all within the year before he died. And, Grandma's greatest fear as she aged was losing her memory–of having the overwhelming awareness that you were slipping away but being too late to hold on just a little longer. So, when she passed suddenly while we were up in the mountains, in a way, I think her wish was granted too. 

I know that time is expansive, unending, and ouroboric. I know that of all the mathematical, statistical, and scientifical probabilities, it is seemingly impossible for us to exist here, now. When we try to make sense of the universal powers that be, often our brains can only grasp and want for control or understanding. So, when I’m faced with the incomprehensibility of it all—I can’t help but feel an all consuming sense of wonder (and maybe a little dread). To know that of all the infinitesimal versions that could exist, it is this iteration of me that came to be. 

They say not to borrow grief from the future, but my grief is an old friend. I find her in the eyes of the people I love, in their voices—struck by the sudden recognition of a face they used to know. Different, of course, but familiar in just the same way. A face forged from centuries of hardship, survival, hope, and love. I like to believe that love is, in the end, what brought me here. This me; with this body and this face. This me; who fears not growing old, who hopes for a future. This me; with a love that I now get to carry with me, in the bags under my eyes and the wrinkles at their edges.