It was my
birthday recently, and having turned 27, there is now no denying that I’m in my
late twenties. And today at the gym, it finally hit me – I’m no longer 24. In
fact, I haven’t been 24 for quite some years now. I don’t know why, but in my
mind I’d somehow never quite come to terms with this fact, until today.
This was of
course a terribly depressing realisation. It suddenly dawned on me that my
years of doing young people things are now over. As much as I hate clubbing,
what I hate more is that if I decided to go clubbing now, I’d be surrounded by
people young enough to be my much younger siblings. And this seemed really
unfair. Nobody warned me when I was 24, or 22, or 18, that in a few years time
I’d be too old for some of the things I enjoyed doing. All those all nighters
when I stayed up to watch the sunrise have been replaced with me either passed
out by 12am, or else making it till 3, or maybe even 4, only to find that I can
no longer function as a human being the next day.
And one
thought that struck me might sound rather strange, but I suddenly wondered when
last I had been on a slide. I couldn’t remember, of course, but I must have
been pretty young, possibly even under 10. And then I thought, I’m probably
never going to go on a slide again. Especially since the one in the park says
no over 14s, and I tend to be a pretty law abiding person. I’m also worried I
might break it, which would be rather embarrassing.
But the
last time I went on a slide, I didn’t know that this would be the last time. It
would have been just like any other slide experience. And that’s the scary
thing about growing up. No one warns you that things are going to change. You
just wake up one day and realise you’ve been out of school for longer than you
were in it, and that there are people you’ve said goodbye to that you’ll
probably never see again. Is it better in that sort of situation to know that
it’s the last goodbye, or to just treat it like any other goodbye until you
realise much later that it wasn’t?
