{"id":1823,"date":"2012-05-28T22:32:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T02:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=1823"},"modified":"2012-12-04T13:15:44","modified_gmt":"2012-12-04T18:15:44","slug":"the-age-timeline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/birthmarked\/the-age-timeline\/","title":{"rendered":"The Age Timeline"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"When I was six, walking along the sunny sidewalk in front of the apartment building, I imagined age like a timeline of numbers where 6 was big and close at hand, 7 was ahead, slightly smaller, and the other years of age drifted ahead of me in black print against a murky beige background, growing smaller in the distance.\u00a0 I could still see my age of 5 from my last birthday behind me, but it was shrinking, and 4 was smaller still.\u00a0 My older brothers would always be unfairly older than I was, and my younger sisters would never catch up to me.\u00a0 All grown ups were the same age: big.<\/p>\n

Now I\u2019m big.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been this way since I was about fifteen, and the numbers are still moving along the beige background.\u00a0 Fortunately, though the timeline is a one-way path to live, it\u2019s also a slippery time-machine I can travel at will, backwards or forwards.\u00a0 I used to wish I could plop a day of summer into the middle of winter, just so I could have a break from the snow, and I\u2019d trade that winter day into the summer, so I could have the cold then.\u00a0 Now I imagine it and it\u2019s true.\u00a0 I used to long to see into the future.\u00a0 Now I know seeing into the past is the same thing.\u00a0 I can imagine I\u2019m 12, wondering what I\u2019d be like when I would be 22, and now I know what I was like at 22, so I can tell the 12-year-old me I would end up happy.\u00a0 I can find the girl of 15 who thought life was pointless and tell her to keep living because the pointlessness won\u2019t matter to the girl who\u2019s 35.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the elusive girl who was 18, who thought she was crazy when none of her roommates or new friends at college seemed to understand how her mind worked.\u00a0 Are you crazy if you can still ask if you\u2019re crazy?\u00a0 We were not crazy.\u00a0 We were lonely.\u00a0 How lonely we are until we discover that understanding ourselves will suffice.<\/p>\n

I like aging.\u00a0 I\u2019m aiming for 100.\u00a0 It\u2019s very small and far away, but I can just imagine the time-traveling I can do once I\u2019m there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was six, walking along the sunny sidewalk in front of the apartment building, I imagined age like a timeline of numbers where 6 was big and close at hand, 7 was ahead, slightly smaller, and the other years of age drifted ahead of me in black print against a murky beige background, growing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[256],"class_list":["post-1823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","tag-childhood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1823"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1830,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1823\/revisions\/1830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}