Hunting for Gray

Age. It's not something that I think about, yet it's been a constant companion lately. I am settling into maturity, gearing up to wear it like a comfortable t-shirt.

It started with the photo albums. When I look in the mirror I see the same me I've been seeing for years. I've looked the same since I was in college. Yet, a nostalgic tour through all my photo albums a couple of weeks ago showed me a face that was entirely different. Younger, rounder, often surrounded by bad, somewhat poofy hair. Even the newer albums showed me a face that was slimmer, more like my mother's.

It's clearer to me that I am now 10 years older than the girl I think I see in the mirror. And that short hair doesn't actually look good on me.

I go downtown to bars much less than I used to. My appreciation of the live show of a band I am lukewarm about has plummeted. I leave both earlier, eyes burning from the smoke and grateful to be near peeling off my smoky clothes.

Conversations about maturity have been afoot lately too. And not the dirty, whispered meaning of the word that implies old, and settling and boring that I aggressively clung to for years. Instead it's a bold definition that means content, and happy and, well, mature. It's a definition I am comfortably settling into. And settling into adulthood doesn't feel dirty.

Adult used to mean compromise in the worst sense of the word. It meant giving up and giving in. It meant a house in the suburbs and a itchy feeling of restlessness at night when the 10 pm suburban quiet rolled in.

But being adult means being comfortable with who I am, appreciating how lucky I've been, enjoying the people and things in my life that bring me joy and brushing aside the ones that don't. Being an adult means I don't need to act like I am 18 or 22 anymore, and I don't need to explain why to anyone. It means I go to bed early the night before a flight, and I am hopelessly out of fashion among the tragically hip 80s-wearing kids in their pointy shoes and mullets.

This weekend my high school friend Mike came to visit. But Mike is actually someone I've known since 5th grade. I've known him 18 years.  18! I got my first (of many) horrendous haircuts at 10. I got caught reading Judy Blame's Forever. I started shaving my legs.

Even the years of friendship scan an impressive number of years: 14. Mike and I aren't the type of friends who wax poetically about the years past. Yet, several times this weekend, something made us feel old - such as the pinnacle of our musical awakening, the early 90s, having been almost 15 years ago - and would catch us off guard.

When I left for college my Dad told me that time would go by faster as I got older. I nodded in agreement, even though I didn't understand.But now, 10 years later, when 10 years doesn't make up 50% of my life span, I can feel time flying by at a dangerously quick speed. I expect I'll be close to breaking the sound barrier when I am 50.

It was just a few years ago that my mirror face was actually 20. But today, I can see where my wrinkles are going to form (around my mouth where I smile),  I hunt gray hairs that insist on springing curly (curly!) off the top of my head, and I occasionally check on my growing number of freckles to make sure they aren't more than friendly reminders of spending too much time in the sun.