Old Souls

“I can feel myself aging in my bones.” -Kahlee Fann

The nature of my job is to feel old almost all the time. I work with 8th grade students at a north Philadelphia middle school, which means learning a new way to feel ancient each day. Sometimes it is hearing about rap stars who seemingly materialize on my students tongues. on other occasions it is recognizing that none of the references I make to my childhood’s own media and events mean anything at all to anyone I see.

Today’s reminder came in the form of a year: 2004. That’s the year Spider-Man 2 was released, George Bush was re-elected, and pop culture’s inundation with reality TV shows about people who are famous for being famous churned into full swing. It’s also the year of the student I was talking to was born. That means when I was in my first year of high school, the student was 5 years old. 5. Years. Old. And now he wanted my advice working through his first break up at 13.

I’m 22 now. The same age as the friend who provided the epigraph above. She told me tonight that she checks her blood pressure frequently and is developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Since I last saw her in person at age 16 she took a wrong into elderly life decades before her time. Such is the nature of things in a realm where time exists neither as a smooth river nor a flat circle. Time is a concept contained in the mind and like so many mental processes fluctuates its speed, quality, tension, and coherence. Time dilates becomes quick then slow runs backwards and forwards all while we seek to catch up.

As I spoke to the student born in 2004, my own bones began to ache because I struggled to recall feelings so far gone. The first time I was dumped was the only time I was ever dumped*. Tapping back into 16 year old Jason’s eclipsed emotions and attempting to transmit those feelings via conversation so that my student might see that he will one day no longer be in the throes of his current anguish was an exercise in nostalgia and recreation. While I vividly recall singing Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” at the top of my lungs to irritate the young girl who broke up with me, I could hardly tap into the emotions I felt on that bus. Despite the inaccessibility of the past, I could see in my student that we did not have dissimilar feelings, spread as they were some 6 years apart.

I am often told by older friends that I possess the soul of someone who has spent more than 22 years and 3 months on Earth. They always mean this as a compliment but I have often worried that I have somehow pushed myself out the door too soon. Was it reading mature (read: violent and sex-filled) novels as a 7th grader, or hearing frank conversations between my older siblings and cousins, or simply the weight forced down by years of sadness from the world around me? Some mixture of these and more, I’m sure, gives my companions the impression of maturity which shields only a heart of youthful folly.

I am writing this as music from a 20 year old video game plays softly in the background. “Zelda’s Lullaby” has been a tool of study and thought for me since first playing the Ocarina of Time just 3 years ago. In those three years this song and that game have taken on a level of nostalgic warmth which one typically finds in memories of a long-gone childhood. Such is the strangeness of time that a game first released when I was 2 and not experienced by myself until 19 can exist now at 22 somewhere in the recesses of my memory banks as a lifelong friend.

When I consider this, I better understand the animus of those whose nostalgia has turned them towards volatile emotions. Who wouldn’t try to rescue a long lost love whose presence one can still feel each day? Who would not instinctively follow a man who offers them a return, complete with the rose tinted glasses of today? The drive to reexperience so-called better times again and again is a driving force in our politics, entertainment, and culture at large. Not only because of a hope that we can reach back to what has ended, but to avoid the oncoming rush of eternal death. The drive to be young again in mind, body, spirit, and society is the sickly-sweet Elixir of Familiarity which so many of us drink from deeply.

So we beat on, boats against the current — oh, no, there I go again. Turning to an old love for answers to today’s problems.

*More due to a lack of numerous relationships than abundant romantic skill.

This November, I’ve decided to pursue NANO WRIMO the way a non-novelist might. I will be blogging, or essaying, or, perhaps, reporting throughout November, with the aim to publish 5 times a week. This is the first in that series. Topics can be suggested here.