Forever Young
“Yes Luna had almost died at the age of two for a minute,” exclaims my dad to his new business colleagues as we all sit across from one another at some fine dining restaurant. The waiters bring in the final course of the dessert that looks like it could be gulped down in one bite. I lift my spoon in a gentle manner and try and take a small bite of the sorbet and focus on the rich chocolate flavors. Across from me sits Jake, who has not looked up from his phone for longer than 5 seconds. He doesn’t even realize there’s a rich chocolate sorbet in front of him.
“She missed death by just a few seconds,” he says after his colleagues seem to be curious and concerned over my “heroic act”. I look up at them, smile shyly, and look back down at my food. I take a few more small, slow bites of the dessert, my head buzzing with the song “Young and Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey as I slow down their voices in my head.
“It was wonderful meeting you! We hope to build our company’s relationship and ours with you!” exclaims dad as I notice everyone rise up and shake each other's hands.
The car ride home is silent for a few minutes. The only sound is of the gentle engine rumbling and the occasional grunt of my dad when a driver doesn't drive the way he wants. I watch as cars and people disappear before I can even begin to remember their faces. Everything is a blur, every speckle of dust, snow-white clouds, and my mind. We are, after all, clouds of thoughts and emotions floating around in our bodies through space and time. I have lost the song that was echoing in my mind. A shield I would use to block out the outside world from my internal world.
“Why were you so quiet again, Luna? Why couldn’t you just talk to them?” asks my dad after a few moments. I look up at him and see him looking at me through the rearview mirror, annoyance in his tone and over his face. “Why can’t you just be normal and talk to their kids and make friends?” he asks more.
I turn my face toward the window and think of their son, who couldn’t put his phone down for even a second of the entire dinner. The only thing he said to me was “Wassup? You're that nerd aren’t you?” That's when I knew it was best to not initiate any conversation, and he seemed perfectly okay with chatting to his friends on his device.
“I didn’t want to talk to their son who was busy using his phone,” I say in a slightly annoyed tone. My dad, within a second, starts refuting that too while I just look out of my window, letting the world take me far away with it.
As soon as we reach home, I get to my room, lock the doors, and lay on my bed, happy to be back. The soft blanket of my bed is a comforting cocoon I wrap around myself. I wish my dad would just let me be. I still recall the times we used to go play football when I was just three. We would run behind the ball, laugh, and just be free. I know life hasn’t been fair to him. Being an only child and having to deal with so many opinions about being a certain way, he too had been torn between being himself or being who the world wanted him to be. Still, I wonder sometimes if he’ll ever understand me and understand that I don’t want to be like everyone else.
My mind begins to wander back to the idea of death. The death that my dad was describing as heroic to have escaped from. Shivers run down my body as I begin to remember a time when I was eight. I place my hand on my heart as I recall doing so with so much paranoia at that age. I used to listen to my heartbeat for hours on end to make sure I wasn’t dying. I couldn’t stop thinking and worrying that I was going to die at any second. If I were to recall why that began, I can’t think of an exact reason. All I knew was that I was so afraid of dying that I had to make sure my heart was still beating. I had to make sure I was still alive.
A soft breeze from my window pulls me back into my room. I lay my head on my soft purple pillow and play with the hems of my crochet top. I still have such thoughts that plague my mind, but not as bad as they once were. Within my short life lived, I have come to an understanding which is quite impossible in itself: I want to be forever young. I want to live on this Earth forever, but as a young adult. Quite contradictory and not possible, isn't it?
Despite not knowing a lot about my soul, I do believe that our bodies are separate from the spirit that they carry. This spirit, which is so individual yet similar to every other spirit within everybody. Doesn’t the spirit live forever? How come we know things about ourselves and the world without ever quite learning about them? Have we perhaps been here on this Earth before? Have we previously experienced everything we do now with the only catch being that we have lost our memories of those experiences?
The shadows on the wall created by my glass windchime capture my attention. How is it that light works so beautifully and intricately with glass to create such magic? Having a mom that has practiced spirituality for a while, I refused to understand or believe in it until I was around fifteen. Being young and naive made me want to refute what she’d always had faith in. She believes in angels and a higher power way beyond the human dimension we live in. How is it possible to exist beyond where we are right now, physically? How is there a world beyond the one we touch and see? As I got older, the norms that religion set on the world and its people became more evident to me. These norms were also limiting, and almost forceful, to believe and have faith in. I began to seek something more natural and more uncertain where I could be the controller of my experiences, perceptions and realities. There were no rules, just me and my experiences and my understanding of life.
When I was younger, I used to want to die young, I never quite understood why someone would want to live forever. However, as I got older, my relationship with my mom improved and I was able to allow myself to be open to love, to all the good things such as sunrises, sunsets, flowers, butterflies, ice cream, long drives. I soon began to see truly how beautiful and mesmerizing this world is, and I don’t want it to ever end.
Upon entering this realm of my thoughts, I get up from my bed, walk towards the radio and insert the cassette that starts playing “Forever Young” by Alphaville, one of my favorite songs. I found this song when I was around fifteen and I immediately fell in love with the lyrics. I know being forever young is obviously not possible. However, in some odd way it is. One can be forever young by always embodying their youth. Even though I haven’t reached the age of fifty or sixty, I hope I am always open to new ideas and new experiences and that I always strive to look for the brighter and lighter sides to life. Another way I can be forever young is through my ideas, relationships, and connections with the world and people because those things never die nor do they ever fade.
I remove my headphones from my ears, place them on the bedside, and put on my fluffy purple slippers. I walk down the steps to the living room slowly, hear the television play — a Transformers movie is playing; I can hear Megatron speak. I stand before the sofa and see my dad sitting there in this t-shirt and shorts. A few of his hairs are beginning to turn grey, some parts of his head more scarce than the rest. The argument we had now further in my mind. Instead, what takes over is a certain fear. A fear of not spending enough time with him.
When I was a child, I always knew my parents would always be around. The thought of their death never fazed my mind. I had never thought of that until twenty years into my life. The cycle of life is so funny and complicated: we are born, and we spend the next twenty years or so of our lives trying to figure ourselves out, whilst our parents are growing older. When we do somehow realize that, we have taken up our own responsibilities, and our parents begin to fade in and out of their lives. They have dreams and hopes they wish they could fulfill but keep being dragged down by the number of their age and the lack of freedom. We watch from the sidelines as everything suddenly feels to be moving too quickly and there isn’t enough time or assurance to fix things that were wronged.
I still don’t have the exact answers to these dilemmas. Instead, I have come to find that death is inevitable. It is a cycle that we all must go through no matter how scary or uncertain it seems. It's sweeter and lighter to let go of the past and how things were and focus on how we want things to be.
I hear my dad call out my name. I look up and see him ask me if I want to watch the movie with him. I give him a huge smile, grab a drink and get comfortable on the sofa as we watch the movie together on the screen. I glance at him from time to time and smile in my mind, that we get to spend time together watching his favorite movie. So I guess my answer to my dilemmas is: in the end, it’s never about the movie anyway. I turn toward the screen and watch my dad’s eyes follow the scene. I snuggle next to him on a pillow and ask “Is this the new transformers movie?”
My dad looks up with a small hit of a smile and says “Yes. I’ve been wanting to show you this movie.”
“I’m excited. It already looks so interesting,” We turn our eyes to the screen and watch as the good Transformer takes down the bad Transformer and I cherish these small, sweet moments of pure joy and love with my dad.
