There are songs that will always make me tear up a bit, even when it’s just a bunch of kids singing them.
(And sometimes that makes it worse.)
This is one of those songs.
As I near the end of my final day as a fifty-year-old man, and the completion of five full decades in this world, I pause and wonder at my place in it. Well, not so much the peculiar places at which I’ve resided, but more at the places the world allows for us. So much inhospitality, so much hostility – so many ‘Do Not Enter’s, so many ‘Keep Out’s – so many private spaces and inaccessible hearts – even when I belonged, I never felt like I belonged.
So many things I would have done…
This is why part of me hates birthdays, and why they’ve always made me uncomfortable: this is when the world forces a look back at one’s life, at the year that came before, and the years that came before that, and before you know it a song like this is playing and you’re weeping at what it now means to you, and how it means so much more than it did when you were a kid and your Mom was just playing it on the car stereo as your family hurtled along on a summer vacation that felt like the happiest time you would ever have in your entire life. And maybe it was, and you didn’t know it then, but you know it now, and that makes you cry harder, and it’s all too late.
But now it’s just another show, and you leave ’em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know… don’t give yourself away
Fuck.
Fifty was hard.
Harder than I ever let on, until perhaps tonight.
I wasn’t sure I was ever going to admit that.
I’m still not sure about it, and maybe I’ll pull this at the last minute. They say one should never write when the dander is up. I’d add that one shouldn’t write when the tears are down.
Tears and fears and feeling proud, to say, “I love you, ” right out loud…
When I said I was out of fucks to give, I didn’t mean it. I thought I did, but I wasn’t that strong. We’re never as strong as we pretend to be. And when we’re not pretending, we’re still not that strong. At least I’m not.
How and why a fifty-year-old-man should feel like the little boy he once was, walking home from school in the rain and letting the raindrops fall into his eyes so no one could tell he was crying, is one of those stupid things that happens to reveal the ludicrous state of being a fifty-year-old and remembering your youth. It’s why on most days I don’t look back.
I really don’t know life at all.
