"Us, Ancient" - A Short Love Story

And the Joy of Aging

Us, Ancient

You know what I love most about swimming? How perky my breasts get. All round and full and buoyant. Gorgeous, really! And floating right up there where they should be.

It’s so deflating when I get out.

My husband tells me not to worry. He still sees me perfect.

“What? When you shut your eyes?”

“Well, I don’t have to shut them.”

“I’m just saying . . . .” he says, when I give him that look.

He tries.

But I know what he means, this man who is fast turning into his father the older he grows. And his father! That scrawny, bald-headed buzzard was never much to look at, even when we met. Certainly nothing like his son, who I’m telling you, was hot enough to burn rubber back then.

But that’s not how I see him now. Not as his father, and not as he was when we first said I do.

There comes a time when the body loses its elasticity to such a degree, that you just start spilling out of it. You just aren’t there anymore.

That person in the mirror? Not me now. Not sure where I am. Hovering somewhere around the body maybe. But more outside than in. And him, too. This man I married.

What I see now is not a body, but a being. A living, thinking, breathing being who just happens to fit perfectly into my arms. Someone I want to grow old with. And not just “till-death-do-you-part” old. But old. As in ancient.

Man-in-the-moon old. Mountains melting into the sea, old. Earth spinning off its axis, old.

Starships dodging dark holes, novae bursting into newness. . . . you see what I mean.

Us, swimming like dolphins through the universe, old. That’s how I see us.

by Deborah J. Brasket

This short story first appeared, in a slightly different version, in Drunk Monkeys. 

The Universe, the Sea, and the Joy of Aging

I’m not sure what it is about “the universe” I find so inspiring. I’m not alone. Humans have gazed at the stars in awe and wonder since the beginning of time. Perhaps, like me, they feel some strange kinship. They say we’re made of star-dust, after all.

I’ve always felt that’s why I have such an affinity for the sea. Seventy percent of our bodies are water. And that’s where life on earth all began, in the sea. Each human as well begins its life in the womb surrounded by a type of sea water. Amniotic fluid is salty.

They say that the molecules, cells, and even DNA of our bodies have a type of memory. Might that memory carry traces of its beginning at the dawn of time? I like to think so. I’m not sure how else to explain the feeling of deep empathy with the ocean and the night sky–-as if I know them well, as if we are old friends, as if once I was rocked to sleep in their arms. As if I’m not done with them yet, and we are only partly parted. Something of me remains in them still.

This is what aging does, I guess. Allows us to slip the reins of reason and rationality into poetic license.

Oliver Sacks wrote a piece for the New York Times called “The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding!)”. It ended with this:

“My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”

While I am still a long ways from 80, I’m beginning to feel this way more and more too, as if this body that has contained me all these years is slowly evaporating, and I’m becoming freer to be what I always was but never quite realized.

A poet called it “mostly Love, now.” Mostly joy works too.

I’d love to hear what you think!