Getting older by surprise
Jenny Erpenbeck:
The illnesses that begin to afflict us take us by surprise, they set our bodies in motion in different ways than we intend, slowing them down, speeding them up, disturbing their rhythm. They take us by surprise. The years leave their marks on our skin, which was still a child’s skin only recently, they leave the brown marks of old age, they make small letters blur before our eyes, they take us by surprise, and because it all happens so slowly, we don’t even understand when the transition took place, slowly the years carry men’s youth away, one hair at a time, they gradually, very gently, crease women’s skin, and we, we that remain in that skin, we see with those eyes, which now perceive small letters as an illegible blur, but we don’t see signs of aging in our thoughts, and that’s why we’re taken by surprise when the years have slipped over us like a dress, and we think that actually, if we wanted to, we could take them off again, that’s why our arms appear to grow more unfamiliar to us the older they get, to grow more distant the more they try to force us to acknowledge their closeness by confronting us with pain and impossibilities, that’s why we’re taken by surprise when our own exhaustion makes us faint, and when we consider the fact that death is drawing nearer to us, one friend at a time, we’d prefer to forget that our lives often last longer than our ability to grow older.
Things that disappear, pp. 69f
