Twenty-Four

It was so easy to be twenty-four, wasn't it? To be young and ambitious and beautiful in The City; still new enough to greet every experience with wide-eyed enthusiasm and dive into everything you did headfirst without checking the depth of the water. To be dating one man, stringing another along, and sleeping with yet a third, just because you could.

You had power and you were drunk with it, rolling in it, wallowing in it, as if you knew that you had to do it now, NOW before The City stopped loving you for being young and brash and started dealing you swats across the nose with the rolled-up newspaper of its indifference; before you stopped being good-looking and became, instead, good-looking-for-your-age.

You look in the mirror in the morning now and say, child, at least you knew what you had when you had it.

By the time you got to that certain age, clinging to the top of the slope with your feet scrabbling for a toehold, looking over your shoulder to where the chasm of forty yawned below you, you knew that you had learned at least three things about yourself.

First, that the Great Love of Your Life had not been any man, not either of the two you nearly married, nor the many others who got swept up in the comet-tail of your hurly-burly life, but this conglomeration of buildings and noise and brutal energy that fed you and drove you until it burned you out and you had to flee.

Second, that you had a gift for solitude; that in The City of crowds and constant companionship, you were able to find that place inside you where you knew the difference between lonely and alone. That there was a crucial part of your nature that made you, unlike your fellow citizens of the Metropolis, turn inward when injured, to crawl under the porch of your psyche to lick your wounds in solitary, to nurture your independence as if you knew that somewhere down the road you were going to need it.

Third, that along the way you learned a watchfulness and wariness that most people didn't see. That you could be the girl who turned every head when you entered a room, or you could choose to be invisible. You learned to keep others from learning about you by learning about them, instead. You deflected their questions about you and your life by beating them to the punch and asking them about theirs, letting them talk about themselves, knowing that everyone's favorite topic of conversation is, eternally, himself. You left them feeling puzzled and a little cheated, feeling as if they had exposed their soul to someone whom they knew nothing about.

No, wait.

There was something else you learned. That there were still tears inside you, and after a long and arid time, you found that you were just a walking cliche after all.