I found the box of photographs in the cupboard beneath the stairs. I wasn’t looking for them. I was looking for a screwdriver. But there they were, wedged behind some Christmas decorations and a broken vacuum cleaner, in a shoebox that had once held a pair of trainers I bought in 1998. I sat on the floor of the hallway, my knees aching as I lowered myself down, and started flipping through them.
There was one of me at a party, probably aged 24 or 25. I was holding a bottle of something, leaning against a wall, laughing at whoever was behind the camera. My hair was thick and dark and fell across my forehead in a way I’d completely forgotten. I looked like someone I might be friends with. I sat there for a long time, staring at this stranger who was also me, trying to reconcile the person in the photograph with the person sitting on the cold tiles of the hallway, holding his own past in his hands.
The thing about getting old is that nobody prepares you for the strangeness of it. People warn you about the bad knees and the grey hair and the way hangovers start lasting three days. What they don’t tell you is how profoundly weird it is to have been multiple people in one lifetime, and to remember being those people, and yet to feel only tenuously connected to them, as if they were characters in a novel you read long ago and have mostly forgotten.
When I was 25, I thought of my future self, the 50-year-old, as a kind of fixed destination, a person I would eventually become and then simply be. It never occurred to me that the becoming would never stop. That I would keep becoming and becoming, shedding selves like a snake sheds skins, until one day I would find myself sitting on a floor holding a photograph and wondering which of all those selves was the real one. If any of them were.
The poet George Oppen captures something essential about aging in saying “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” The sense of being a bewildered child trapped inside a body that has been transformed by forces entirely beyond your control. You didn’t ask for this. You didn’t consent to it. And yet here you are, staring at your hands and noticing that they look like your father’s hands, and feeling a kind of vertigo, as if you have been dropped into a life that belongs to someone else.
The strange thing is that inside, nothing much has changed. At 50, I still feel roughly the same as I did at 30. The same anxieties. The same foolish hopes. The same tendency to laugh at stupid jokes and get unreasonably upset about minor inconveniences. My personality hasn’t aged. Only my face and body has. I am a young person being slowly buried beneath the accumulating evidence of time.
There’s a John Cheever story called “The Swimmer” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1964/07/18/the-swimmer), that I read in my twenties and have never forgotten. A middle-aged man decides to swim home from a party by way of his neighbours’ pools. It’s a sunny afternoon, the drinks are flowing, everything is golden. But as he progresses from pool to pool, something shifts. The weather gets colder. His neighbours start treating him strangely. By the time he arrives home, the house is empty and abandoned, and we realise that what seemed like a single afternoon has actually been years, maybe decades. His whole life has slipped away while he wasn’t paying attention.
There’s also a song that captures this feeling: “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads.
I heard it constantly growing up without really understanding it. It was just a weird song with a good beat that they played at school discos. But somewhere in my forties, I heard it again, really heard it, and felt like I’d been struck in the chest. You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. You may ask yourself: well, how did I get here? Byrne said later that the song was about how we operate half-awake through life, on autopilot, accruing things, the house, the car, the family, without ever consciously choosing them. And then one day you stop and look around at what you’ve built and you have no idea how any of it happened. The song isn’t sad, exactly. It’s bewildered. It has the quality of someone waking from a long dream and finding that decades have passed. The water is flowing underground. Same as it ever were.
The feeling of only having set off a few minutes ago. The sun still high in the sky. The drinks still cold. And yet somehow, here I am, at a destination I never remember choosing, in a body I barely recognise, with a history I’m no longer certain belongs to me.
There is a temptation, when you get older, to smooth it all into a story. To impose narrative order on what is essentially a series of accidents. This happened, which led to that, which is why I am who I am today. We tell ourselves these stories because the alternative, that life is largely random and that we are mostly at the mercy of forces we don’t control, is too terrifying to contemplate.
But sometimes the story breaks down. Sometimes you find yourself lying awake at 3am, and all the narrative scaffolding collapses, and you are left with the raw fact of your own existence: a consciousness that appeared without explanation, housed in a body that is slowly falling apart. At those moments, the strangeness of being alive becomes almost unbearable. You want to shake someone awake and say: do you understand what is happening? Do you understand how completely insane this is? But of course you don’t. You just lie there in the dark, waiting for the feeling to pass.
I closed the shoebox and pushed it back into the dark. The screwdriver could wait. Everything could wait. That’s the thing about time, it moves in one direction only, and it doesn’t care whether you’re ready. The young man in the photograph had his whole life ahead of him, which meant he had no idea what was coming. He would eventually become me, sitting on this cold floor with aching knees and a heart full of something that wasn’t quite sadness. More like wonder. What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
Letting the days go by.
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