Getting older and slides

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?

I don’t think I’m doing a very good job at this whole growing up thing, but I guess there’s no right way to do it. Sometimes I have to remind myself that there are no save points along the way. I can’t just reload to when I was 24 and do everything over. I had my chance back then and now those years are in the past. It’s time to overcome the immaturity and become a responsible adult, because that’s what I am. Well, the adult part at least. But maybe it’s worth trying out a slide just one last time, you know, so I can really savour the experience. Or maybe twice… It’s hard to say goodbye.