Years Held Between Us

I am afraid of growing up.

I say it as if naming it might slow it.

I continue to speak such words

as if my spoken word could bargain with inevitability.

The body declares what it cannot keep.

I have already seen it in my father.

The way he carries years now,

In a look that does not belong to any single day

but to many days that stain

and do not lift.

And I think of his father, gone now.

Every day of work etched into his eyes.

My father is beginning to wear that same expression,

as if it was passed down quietly

and unnoticed in its patrimony.

One has left,

the other will follow.

The body does not ask to remain unchanged.

It feels unjust to resist what it becomes.

Because what is aging but a slow inheritance?

Not of objects, or words even,

but of expression?

Of the way a face holds time,

without ever speaking of it.

I am afraid of growing up.

With that fear I stand among them.

The living, the aging, the dead.

With age, the same movement passes through me,

seemingly without end.

But still,

with a promise of finality.