forgetting possibility

I understand that to complain about aging when I am only twenty-eight years old might be a little irritating to many readers.

Let me try and justify myself.

I know I'm still a young person. I know these are only the first of the wrinkles (and it's really just a few around my eyes at this stage). I know this whole aging thing is going to start coming at me thicker and faster as time passes and that I will look back in a few years or more and want to punch myself for even thinking I was starting to get old when I was only in my goddamn twenties. Look, I know that.

But the thing you have to remember is: I've never aged before.

This is it - the first time.

I used to be able to eat what I wanted, and never put weight on my stomach. I used to be able to stay out drinking until 4am and still function the next morning. My lips used to be red enough naturally to get away with not wearing lipstick. Smoking two packs of Peter Stuyvesants a day didn't matter before; I was going to quit when I got older.

It's kinda scary.

Really it is.

And last night I caught up with a couple that I haven't seen since I was about twenty-one. Maybe twenty-two.

At the most.

Actually, I ran into them in the supermarket a few weeks ago; turns out they did the Hills Exodus not long after we did. To be honest, I'm quite amazed that it's taken so long to cross paths with them - they only live about a kilometre up the road. But I thought to myself: there's probably a reason for that, and their phone number promptly found it's way into the loose papers in the bottom of the drawer.

But they called. And last night I went out with them for a drink.

These people haven't seen me since I stopped wearing platform sneakers and psychedelic print babydoll dresses. A time in my life that my friend Adam refers to as my Fitzroy's Darling phase. When I was running poetry events and doing festivals and was so convinced of my own immortal alternative coolness that I think it could have actually been considered a mental health issue.

Obviously, such things are no longer. And that's probably a good thing, of course. But last night, after a few five-dollar glasses of bad sparkling white, I couldn't help being a little nostalgic for those times.

Why?

It wasn't because I was thinner / less wrinkled / had redder lips / anything else I listed above.

No, it wasn't that.

This goes beyond my complaints about aging.

What I was nostalgic for was the sense of possibility I felt back then. When the future was some dark sparkling unknown, and all the decisions were for later. And none of them mattered because I was hovering in a warm blackness outside of time, filled with visions of all the different things I might still do.

That was the real freedom.

And so this afternoon, I wonder: When did that feeling go away?

And more to the point: why did it?