One picture cracked open her anxieties about aging, ambition, and beauty.
Too old, I think while Googling Patricia Lockwood, the author of the memoir I’m reading, Priestdaddy. It’s not that she’s too old, it’s me. Because she’s 42 and I’m 39, and she’s been publishing poetry and books since she was in her 20s and I’ve been the writer of an inconsistent blog for almost two decades. She’s 42, and I’m speeding by, legs gripping an asteroid like a pony, into a black hole. I’m halfway in the ground, the dark, I feel mostly dead but then I remember that I’m supposedly alive.
“I saw a bad picture of myself yesterday and I’m still recovering,” I send in reply to my friends who are making their weekend plans. My passport expires in July, and I’m trying to get all my tasks out of the way before I sign off work for the holidays. I see my friend Lilli’s passport photo; it’s beautifully blown out, her skin looks like glass. I want that too. She takes me to the little photo shop in the Kotti neighborhood of Berlin. I’ve just walked 30 minutes in the dark with my contacts in lieu of my astigmatism glasses. I feel faint. The lights on the streets hurt my eyes, but I haven’t figured out why yet. I sit down on the little rolling chair between two softboxes, hopeful that their light might diffuse me into oblivion. The guy takes my picture, looks at the camera and grunts in disappointment, taking a reflective whiteboard and placing it under my face to ease the lines.
I stand up, still dizzy. I see my face on the monitor; my eyelid crease is drooping, my smile lines glaring at me like the twisting shape of an inflatable gas station balloon. My whole face feels like an Uncanny Valley portrait someone has placed in this tiny shop as a prank to unease me. The last decade of my hardship and perseverance is no longer a secret for me to keep, it’s a flashing banner on my aged face. Too old. What a joke. What a delusion. For years, I’ve seen the occasional unflattering photograph, and with a quick resolve, I tell myself, That’s not me. But here in this neighborhood, so far from my own, on a side quest to assuage myself that it’s not too late, reality has come to punch me in the jugular.
I spend the next few days Googling plastic surgery treatments, scrolling through Instagram looking at other people’s photos who are around my age. I joke to my friends about flying to Korea and coming back with a new face. I look at myself in my mirrors at home, and I can’t see the face that was on the photo monitor. I see myself—the me that I like, the me that I think is cute and even handsome for being almost 40 years old. I wonder which one is real.
I started listening to audiobooks. The sun sets at three in the afternoon here, and it’s pitch black by four. I used to call my sister or mom every day when I walked to the grocery store, but I want to go out when it’s still light enough outside, when the other people of the world are still lit up by a sun hidden behind a wall of foreboding clouds, before the dark swallows us whole. So I listen to audiobooks, things I wouldn’t want to read in the morning (usually personal essays, before I start writing or working) or in the evening (fantasy, sci fi, romance) before I fall asleep.
I started with Unfit Parent, the memoir of a woman with a disability who’s raising a child. I move on to Friday Night Lights star Minka Kelly’s memoir Tell Me Everything, remembering that my friend had said it was good. It is good. It is devastating. It allows me to see things I haven’t before, recount my life in ways that I try not to think about. I save anecdotes about my childhood for when I’m two beers in and eagerly waiting to dazzle my audience with a melancholy punchline.
Kelly did ketamine therapy to get in touch with her inner child. I don’t know if I have one of those. I was born an adult in a child’s suit, mom’s little best friend and confidant. I felt so trapped being small. I remember falling asleep to my fierce inner ramblings as a 9 year old, the injustice that I wasn’t yet allowed to drive. I hadn’t yet realized I was just a girl, haha, you sweet fucking little idiot.
Hey now, that’s no way to talk to a child. Too old.
Like the Kool-Aid man smashing through a wall of bricks, they bust through: It’s me from the future. Time doesn’t exist anymore. We’re all together here, facing each other in opposition like a TikTok clip of a Jubilee debate that you can’t scroll past, or that Spider-Man meme where all the Spider-Mans are pointing at each other accusingly. How transcendent, how banal, that we can all convene here in this one-bedroom apartment in Berlin. Future me has all the swagger and lack of self-control of Don Rickles, with a New York accent to boot. With me as the audience, they insult me with inspirational quotes:
It’s never too late until you’re dead!
If you knew what I know now (we don’t), you’d do things differently.
In the corner, laughter erupts; it’s still you, us? We’re all dead now, it’s so peaceful here. We can laugh about things, everything. We fade to dust, just like everyone else. It’s magnificent over here. We can do no wrong, because we’re dead. Nothing we did while we were alive really mattered. We’re free. We’re glowing, untethered by reality. I use that phrase a lot, or we do. All of us floating here in space together: Don Rickles, the little adult, the nihilist, and me. I’m 39, next year I’ll be 40. Too old.
After my three-day meltdown about my passport photo, I feel rejuvenated. The wise women of the web (WWW) have spoken to me through the tiny portal in my hand. They have sent me a message from above; they have seen my pain of trying to exist in this world. They have faces that crack and move and wink. They are beautiful, and they are ugly. They perform for no one. They exist for themselves. They are flawed, and they are glorious.
I want that for me too, I want them to see me and welcome me into their alternate reality, to hand me the key. I look at the young women around me. I realize that if I buy a new face, they won’t be able to see themselves in me when they get older. Instead of a key, I’d hand them an anvil, and together we’d sink to the bottom of the ocean. It’s so dark down here; none of us can see each other anymore.
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