We Were Kings

I'm not afraid of getting old. I don't even know what old means. When I was younger, I thought all old people were Christians. I think I thought that because all the old people I knew were Christians, and also because when you're young you want to protect everyone. When you're young, you protect people with your thoughts, which are like pockets, which are like home. You want to keep things close, because when something is close, you can touch it and turn it over in your hands, which are like your mind. I turn things over in my mind, and sometimes, when I do, there's something waiting for me underneath. One time, I was in a noodle shop in London with some friends. I wish you could have been there, it was the best. They brought out your food in huge bowls that were filled almost to the top with broth and spices and, just beneath the surface, noodles. You probably guessed that, because I said it was a noodle shop. Life was close then. My friends and I had a race to see who could drink their bottle of wine first. I won, and that makes me think of the time when I was even younger and I hit my first home run while my mom and dad were standing behind me, behind the backstop. Whatever else happens, my mom and my dad and I will always have that moment. And, whatever else happens, my friends and I will always have that time in the noodle shop in London. We were kings, then. A different time, when I was in London, my friends and I sat in a pub on New Years Eve and ran up a 200 pound bar tab. Then, later, after we ran up some more tabs at other pubs, we went to Trafalgar square and sang our school song while the ball dropped on the big screen in front of us, in front of thousands of people. We were kings then, too. My parents and I used to go to a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, you should go there, you'll find what you hoped to find there. We used to hike up to the top of a place near there, and I remember that I used to be on the verge of crying sometimes when we got to the top because my mom's back always hurt, and she always came with us anyway. If I could, I would take that hurt from her and hurt for her instead, but I can't. The world isn't that kind of place. When I was young, my mom used to play wiffle ball with me. I don't know why, but I think it was because she loves me. I don't know why she loves me, but maybe that's because being loved is a hard thing to understand. I said before that I wasn't afraid of being old.That's true, but sometimes it isn't true, in the way that sometimes, when you love someone, you lose sight of it. The reason is that when you're old, I think you're fuller of things, you're easier to spill. There are times, when I think about hitting a wiffle ball into my mom's leg or watching her climb a mountain or racing my friends to drink a bottle of wine, that my heart, and sometimes all of me, weeps. There are times that you weep because there's nothing you can do, and other times its because you don't know what else to do. Right now, I don't know what else to do. When you're old, I think it's because you don't know what else to do, either. Jonathan Foer wrote in his book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close that "In the end, everyone loses everyone. There was no invention to get around that". Things will change, and people will pass, and the only thing that I'll know for certain is that we were young once, and we were kings.