I come home and find myself standing in the middle of the room, thinking, my unbuttoned shirt still hanging over me. Of course, first, I lose myself in it all. It is only after I have been standing for, by my estimate, fifteen minutes that I find myself again. I would say this happens a lot, and some platitude about life and growing up may fit well here, but there is no use for it, so it would be wasting valuable words.
But there is something about growing up, about standing in a silent room, lost in all aspects of my thought and none of them at the same time, that takes me by surprise. If someone quizzed me about what I was thinking, I would not have an answer for them because, frankly, I don’t remember. I wonder how I got here and where did all the time go. There is an official letter I must reply to or at least address with an email. It has stayed on my desk for a while. I have sat on the desk repeatedly, day after day, but never gotten around to it, for it wasn’t urgent. The letter reminds me of how old I have gotten from what I remember as myself, where I started from, which, if you ask anyone much older than me, would be the equivalent of chump change in years.
Ask the old, and they have more years they have probably wasted than you have lived and considered crucial, even formative. Yet, it does not change anything; it does not stop me from standing by myself, thinking.
So, now, I am freed from my daze of whatever I was thinking about, which, if I were to do a loose inventory, would be whatever I don’t much talk about: a sliver of a memory from a long time ago, how I feel after living another day, of the little and big things that are happening, of the little and big things that have already happened, of life, in general, of other people, and perhaps, as always, of how little I can control. And now that I am freed of this without finding any conclusion and forgetting most of it, I must brew a cup of coffee.
This is, perhaps, the simplest way to tell what people think about when they are stopped by themselves in the middle of the room. This is, perhaps, how we get older: one solitary moment at a time.