Friday, February 4, 2011

My first grey hair.

I need to start thinking about this now. I'm not one of those beautiful brunettes from Party of Five. I'm not Matthew LeBlanc. I'm not one of those people with gorgeous shades of mahogany framing their face. When I go grey will I fight it a few years with the bottle or the salon? I'm feeling despair at the fact that I. Have. No. Hair colour! Is it blonde? No, not really... Is it brown?! Certainly not! Is it see through??? Well, quite possibly you're just now getting somewhere... I don't have a hair colour! When the greys come in there's no diguising it! I'm screwed. Me and my washed out indecisive tint.

I understand that most people reading this will question the validity of my mourning the passing of time due to my youth, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to pause to acknowledge this here benchmark, see?

I haven't felt this way for some time. I suppose symptoms of age accumulate gradually over a number of years before presenting their irrefutable evidence. I remember certain moments; being old enough to ride the big kid rides at the CNE, my first armpit hair (yeah, I know, gross) my first period (grosser). But puberty aside, I haven't really noticed any specifics in my early twenties so far. Until recently. I feel cold more intensely, my teeth are falling to shit with some degenerative horribly acidic saliva thing that people usually get before early adulthood (so why do I have ten cavities at all times no matter what I do?!) caffiene affects me, I can't bounce around all night in uncomfortable shoes, my muscles hurt, I'm stooped. I know I'm not painting an accurate picture of a twenty two year old, and none of these things are acute (yet) but they are there. And these are the physiological idiosyncrasies I will carry with me through life more and more with each passing year.

A few weeks ago I remember feeling startled when I looked in the mirror and could recognize that my face had changed in shape and bone structure in the last five years. Those are the moments I dread, actually. The times when you can examine yourself and physically experience (and bear witness to) the fact that you're different and you can't help that you're on this train headed in one direction, and one direction only.

So I find that it is fitting that a few short weeks after I noticed a change in my face, this grey decided to sprout. And it isn't relevant whether or not I was greying before this evening when I first noticed it. The important thing is that I noticed it and it has me feeling considerably shaken. Being a nostalgia buff you've seen me run through an abridged account of adolescence leading up to this moment in time where I wonder what my time here is and what should I use it for? Maybe I could patent some 20/20 foresight for those of us who are tired of having such a preternatural picture of what was and no ability to percieve what will be. Yeah, I could try that. It would be a welcome alternative to my current solution, which was to stumble out of the elevator (that possesed the guitly mirror that started all this) with my pants half done up (don't ask) clutching this grey hair in my hand and holding it under such intense scrutiny I'm surprised I didn't blow it up with my mind. I shoved it in a cough syrup wrapper and stuffed it in my wallet. Like it's an umbilical cord or some other seminal thing of sentimental value. It isn't! It's just a stupid fucking piece of hair that I pulled out of my goddamn head and wrapped in plastic and held on to like a raving fucking weirdo lunatic! Fuck!