FREE TICKET TO HEAVEN by BEE LB
Do Get Old
Angela Townsend
I have been young, and I am now marginally less young, which affords me unique expertise. In the years between my first Strawberry Shortcake sweatshirt and my current Strawberry Shortcake sweatshirt, I have been gifted a library of advice, ranging from pungent to celestial. Now, from the front porch of the youth recreation league known as AARP, I shall give my oration.
Be it known that it benefits no one when you exhort younger children, “never get old.” You condemn them to gloom. They are not the masters of their mitochondria. No bayou of sunscreen will keep them dewy. Their knees are as jangly as yours, and buzzards will etch footprints around their eyes. They will learn about urologists and magnesium and IHOP’s early bird special in their time.
Even if they could arrest time like the superheroes on their underpants, your bleak benediction would help no one. Have you forgotten so quickly the yield of your years? Would you reclaim your original hip at the cost of sturdy cool?
At nineteen, you did not need bifocals, but cruel cataracts convinced you of eyes everywhere. You were brittle as a wafer, wizened by the spotlight. You have only now become supple. Today you wear magenta and pom poms. You know all about the snide eyes and citric compliments. The risk is as real as ever. You are more real. You are more antique. This is no coincidence.
Far be it from you to use the same tongue to lash the nubile and lick your ice cream. In your salad days, you ordered one skim milk scoop in a sterile cup. It stared back like your grandfather’s golf ball. It did not taste much better. Now your stomach billows, but that is why God commissioned hibiscus-print tunics. Rainbow sprinkles invite their thousand best friends to your waffle cone. There is a malted milk marble at the bottom. You can’t stay up past 9:30 anymore, but you are not afraid. How weary would you be, had you never gotten old?
You will never know. Your years are counted out individually, like valuables. Heaven has fond nicknames for each day of your life. Today may be “Punkin” or “Puddin’ Pop.” Perhaps tomorrow will be “Thunderbird.”
It may take longer to get up the stairs, but this affords time to think about marigolds and orangutans. Now that you know everybody is looking at you and nobody is looking at you, you are free to take up the hammered dulcimer or lay down before dinner. If you have more doctor visits, you have a wider audience to appreciate your jokes about sea monkeys or your Sex Pistols T-shirt. No one will suspect you of gluing googly eyes on all the yams in the supermarket.
Everyone will look up if you spill the scandal. “Many things get better.” Someone needs to break the news. Do get old. Do it often. The coolest children wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Angela Townsend works for a cat sanctuary. She is a seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, twenty-time Best of the Net nominee, and the winner of West Trade Review’s 704 Prize for Flash Fiction. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, JMWW, The Offing, SmokeLong Quarterly, trampset, and Witness. She graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and Vassar College.
BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, the space beneath a collapsed ceiling on unceded Anishinaabe land in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Figure 1, The Offing, and Harpur Palate, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co and they can be found at patreon.com/twinbrights