On My First Wrinkle

This week I have developed, or at the very least noticed, my first wrinkle. It is above and to the left of my mouth. And it’s pretty obvious.

Yes, that’s right, something else for me to moan about and hate myself for. But I’m enjoying this, in a bizarre, macabre and nasty way. I am enjoying this outward sign of my own mortality.

There will be an ending and it is now in sight.

Obviously it’s simultaneously depressing, because I’m (finally) ageing, yet have still failed to begin a career, learn a foreign language or achieve anything of note…

But it is good, it definitely IS good, because it means, without any doubt at all, that this shame, horror and unpleasantness is not eternal.

An unabashed signal of my own transience, my forthcoming (and daily more inevitable) demise, is a relief. Nothing is forever. Not my mind. Not my body. Not my pain.

So I welcome the wrinkle. Not because I welcome looking worse, but because I welcome the promise it makes. One day I will be dust. One day everything that makes me up will be nothing.

Have a nice bank holiday weekend!

(I’d like to clarify that the pleasure mentioned is genuine. And this is post-breakdown, not the collapse itself.)