Youth

• Kaitlyn Poole, Grade 11
• Short Story
• 2013

My skin was once like porcelain; smooth and pale. It was a blank canvas for kisses and droplets of sweet perfume. Now it has creased and it drapes over my bones like fine cloth, flecked with darkened sun spots. Pale green and purple vanes form twisted trails across my hands and wrist.

My clear blue eyes are now bleary with years of gazing unprotected into the setting sun and straining into unlit halls.

I can’t remember the day I had discovered that I had progressed from youth into old age. Maybe it was the day I stood before the mirror and discovered a fine, silvery hair falling from my dark curls and straying across my forehead. Maybe it was the moment I picked up an empty coffee cup and noticed bulging, knotted knuckles.
Aging is not a disease. It is a walk that I have taken that has left beautiful mark on my body and mind. It seems like such a very long walk and yet almost too short. Maybe the moments in the past wouldn’t seem so fleeting if I had savoured them when they were the present.
My knees are arthritic from years pulling my weight up creaky stairs. My teeth are yellowed and chipped from tearing off tiny squares of tape and biting into the pale flesh of apples.
There is a crease between my thin eyebrows from puckering my forehead whilst examining my feverish toddler. Lines form a curtain around my mouth, a result of flashing a smile whilst I watched him race to the bus stop with an oversized school bag jostling on his back. Wrinkles of worry frame my eyes after sleepless nights wondering about my baby at university.
My mind has slowed and my memory is hazy from too much daydreaming and pondering. I’m not quite certain of my age. Eighty-nine. Or maybe I’m ninety now. All the years merge together. Years no longer seem like an appropriate form of measurement. I remember they seemed so slow when I was a little girl. A summer felt like it dragged on forever. Now a year seems to be over in a day.
I can still remember the smell of my mother’s bedroom. Vanilla left a sweet, rich print on her pillow and the soft waves of her auburn hair. I remember warm sunlight streaming through my sheer curtains and pooling over my bedroom floor and pretty dolls.
I know the feeling of an itchy school uniform nipping at my sweaty back in the middle of a Bathurst summer. I can remember staring through tears and viewing a distorted chapel on my wedding day. I am still familiar with a child’s cry at two a.m. and the feeling of his slight weight as I nursed him back to sleep. I know a mother’s anxiety, a grandmother’s pride and a widow’s sorrow. I have seen droughts, floods and all the skies in-between.
I have come to the realisation that my life is rapidly progressing toward its end; it is the final chapter to a long story - the coming home after a long journey across a winding path.
Am I frightened? No, not at all. I have heard that death is beautiful. I have heard that beyond it is paradise. My son can take care of himself and my grandchildren have their own children to nurse threw fevers. My dull mind can rest easy.
Do not be troubled. This is not the end. It is simply the end of this journey, the end of this story. Now I am going to progress on a new journey, begin a new story.