It’s my birthday today. I am now officially 39 years old, unemployed, and still living in my family home along with my mother. I have no friends and any form of companionship sounds more like an albatross around the neck than something worthy of pursuing with gusto. I have no girlfriend; I’ve been with two women in my nearly 40 years of breathing and even though I know how sad it rings to the ears of the hoi polloi, I’m not afraid to admit my truth in public. The last time I remember myself socializing according to normal standards dates back to 2008 when, suffocated from the grief-stricken mood that reigned in my home after my father’s death, I sought refuge in various pubs and bars of Athens. There, I drank beers while occasionally talking with some of the other regular customers. Only a selected few of them became my friends in the process, or at least that’s what I thought back then. However, my temperamental disposition which was further boosted by a wide variety of chemical substances, soon rendered me a pariah in such environments. After some time, I knew that many of those who pretended to be friendly denigrated me in the most vulgar of ways as soon as I turned my back, never missing the chance to drip poison. I won’t get into specifics, they remain hurtful even today, but what I can say is that the labels attached to me by the others all fell under the broad category of abnormality or even plain madness. Since then, I can’t trust people anymore. For a long time, I surrendered to the most vicious forms of mental illness: paranoia. And for paranoid people even getting out of the house to buy a pack of cigarettes is a depleting challenge.
The doorbell rings. The first guest is here. Or, to be more precise, my only guest is asking for permission to enter. My brother, two and a half years older than me, stands before the wide-open front door looking me in the eye. I feel my insides warming up when he does that. After he almost exhausts the full list of hackneyed wishes, I usher him to the lush couch with the blue-beige patterned fabric while I get comfortable on the large, upholstered armchair directly opposite my sole visitor who looks to be in a rather vibrant mood, a rarity for him since he married a woman who proved to be the wrong person to start a family with. Now, he is in the process of divorcing and the first rays of sunshine, metaphorically speaking, have started to hit his roughened face, relaxing his facial muscles, and adorning his physique with a more virile façade. I am so happy for him, and I struggle to convince him that I will always be there in time of need, but the many years that have passed since we were close decree a more apprehensive approach on his behalf. It seems that there is a kind of existential lag that leads the trajectories of our brainwaves in different paths, deeming contact between us, in the most profound sense of the word, a desideratum not yet achieved.
He sits cross-legged, and his skinny frame becomes even more conspicuous, his scrawny hamstrings lacking the bulk needed for a healthy posture. He takes the first nip of his whiskey, he always preferred spirits while I tended to opt for beer when it came to alcohol consumption and says in an amiable voice: “39, huh? Next year you will reach the magic number. I’ll be here to offer my condolences.” He flashes a crooked smile and I strain to discern if it has reached his eyes. It did. I decide to honor his playful intentions and, while grinning, I respond: “Ah, my dear boy, talking about the entropy of middle age.” We both laugh heartily, and I realize that this is the first time in years that I felt synchronized with my brother’s frame of mind, our intellects in effortless harmony. His laugh concludes with a mild cough. He holds my gaze: “It’s all about the inevitability bro. We can’t escape time. Procrastination is a hallucination, it concerns the
worldly, the purely subjective perception of time and not the universal, cosmic one. You -should- know best.” I’m all in for this type of conversation and my background in philosophy studies makes things both easier and more enticing. But that’s not the reason why my sibling thinks that “I should know best”. It has to do with lived experiences rather than knowledge. “It’s funny that we have that conversation. Lately, I find myself many times pondering on issues of similar nature. I guess the mid-life crisis is knocking at my door already.” My brother retorts: “You sound like a victim of our times. It’s the course of nature, period. Don’t be like most people whose principal desire is to cast a spell on the process of aging; plastic surgery is only one example of what the masses are willing to do in order to keep alive the chimera of delaying time itself, at least inside their own heads” I interrupt our interaction in order to roll a cigarette. While I’m at it, I take a furtive glance at my brother’s hair which had gone predominantly grey during the last decade. His failed marriage was the tip of a huge iceberg that concealed a myriad of less significant worries underneath. More than enough to make someone seem prematurely aged. But I’m no better as my beard is almost completely silver, testifying to me not being a spring chicken anymore.
As I take the first puff of my cigarette, I ask him: “Wouldn’t you want to restrain time in any way? Do you think that it only signifies vanity or frivolity if one is thinking along these lines?”. Big bro takes his time before answering, he does that every time the little cogs in his brain start to whirl their elegant dances. It always heralds something insightful. In such moments I feel like I could bask in his aura for a lifetime. Finally, he says: “Above everything else, I believe it’s plain wrong. Something out of our reach and understanding. It’s a matter of man discounting his innate limitations. It’s senseless and, quite frankly, ludicrous to see people striving to achieve something impossible. It’s absurd, that’s the right word.” I counter him by asking a pseudo-question that I instantly regret: “You are not referring to the school of Absurdism in philosophy and art, right? I’m familiar with their doctrines and the concept of time is treated in a whole different way…” Am I such a smart-ass? Was that necessary? It didn’t contribute to the conversation one bit or help it evolve in any way. But that’s what happens when you seldom speak face-to-face with a human being. Enthusiasm gets the better of you and you often blurt out drivel for the sake of hearing your own voice.
He hastily replies: “No, I’m not talking in academic but rather in layman’s terms.” Trying to compensate for my idiocy, I continue: “I don’t think it’s reproachable if someone fears old age. As you know, it is senescence that is contrasted with life. Not death.” He lightens up with my observation and we are back in the game: “I’m not implying anything like that. I don’t condemn people who dye their hair or strain the corners of their faces to look 10 or 15 years younger. I understand the urge and perhaps it is intrinsic in human nature. Old age is life’s parody. What bothers me is that the majority of them have not grasped the futility of such an endeavor. And when it inevitably hits them, it makes them bitter and cynical; unhappy.” I’m not sure that I agree with his conclusion, what I know for sure though, is that the stuffy air in the living room has caused me mild discomfort. Thus, I tell my brother to take his drink in one hand and follow me to the balcony where we can keep talking enveloped by the eeriness and wisdom of the moon. Its transformative powers render the tritest of sights completely unrecognizable. It’s not distortion. It’s the transcendental power of the numinous. We sit on the spacious bamboo
chairs, and I decide that it’s time for a beer. It’s been more than a year since I had one. It’s not that I was an alcoholic ever, I was almost everything else except for that, but from a point onward, I realized that even a swig of beer was enough to knock me off balance mentally and make me feel angry for no reason. However, today is special occasion and I will allow myself one cerveza.
I get up to fetch my drink and from the corner of my eye, I see my brother typing something on his mobile. When I get back with a freezing bottle of Greek pilsner, I sit on my chair with my brother beside me at a distance of about a meter. We resume our talking: “You know, I want to be honest with you. The idea of becoming old petrifies me. I am filled with regret about the years I lost searching for my lost soul. Almost four decades alive and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. No career, no friends, no women, no anything. It makes me feel so sad.” He turns his head in my direction and says: “It’s only understandable bro. Even though I refrained from talking to you about your predicaments in the past, I saw you turning into someone else entirely. I witnessed how addiction affected all aspects of your character. I remember you when you still had some friends and I imagine how painful it was for you to slowly drift away from them. Believe me, I can feel you.” His last words evoke a familiar sense of guilt. Because the fact that my sole brother didn’t help me in my time of need is only the one side of the coin. The other one is that I retaliated when he began having serious trouble with his marriage. The thought embarrasses and infuriates me in equal measure. It’s only a few months now that things started becoming better regarding our rapport. “I know you do, and I suspect that you experienced a similar stalemate in your life. Back then, I was seeing the world in a whole different, twisted way. I studied life as a grand forgery sullying all my senses. The others, both each one of them and all together, were part of a vast darkness nexus that surrounded me and crushed my powers of perception.”
It’s been so long since speaking from my heart to anyone. I gulp some beer and continue: “I saw life as a hopeless, bizarre set of misunderstandings whose fate was/were to be never solved. I felt that it was pointless to even try approaching other people as it would never become possible neither for them to reveal their essence to me nor for me to disclose mine to them. And that’s the only thing that really counts when it comes to communicating. I know that now.” He remains silent for a while as if mulling my words in his head. Finally, he says: “I also lived within a trap of my own making. There was no tangible proof of love in our house from the beginning. Kids made things even more strained for several years. Each one of these years felt like two. Perhaps that’s why there is so much grey in my head. I could have broken free much earlier, I know. Don’t ask me why I didn’t. I don’t have an answer ready.” I suck on the rim of the beer bottle for a while and then say: “You don’t have to. Everything will become crystalline clear when time has mitigated your amassed pain. You must let time do the job for you. That’s what I understood from my brush with addiction and mental illness. Trusting time is imperative if you want to achieve quality of life” His mobile pings. A new message. As he reads it, a smile begins to form on his face. “They’re here,” he says. I barely have the time to ask who before he stands up and starts walking toward the front door. He opens and I see my two nephews, Olivia and Alex along with their grandmother, our mother. “This is your birthday surprise. You can’t complain now,
can you?” my brother exclaims. My eyes are glued on the two glowsticks entering our family home, their shrill voices cutting into the room’s solemn atmosphere. I thought that they were on an excursion with my mother, but now I realize this was just a ploy for the surprise to be more effective. The little one, Alex, is only 5 years old. He runs to me to show me his latest toy, a sizable Spiderman doll, while Olivia, always introverted and aloof, strides to the couch where her father was sitting some minutes ago and takes out a book from her rucksack. She is a voracious reader like her father and uncle. It is touching to see her milk-white, delicate little hands holding the book open. I’m certain that she encloses a treasure within her that will be exposed at some point later in her life. I only wish for her to avoid the dangers trailing along the path of people with insurmountable inner depth. Modern civilization mandates that substance abuse and addiction confirm the mythos of the writer, as David Foster Wallace so eloquently suggested, and there are so many sensitive minds who have fallen prey to the siren song of extravagance and decay. The sheer thought makes me shiver.
Each time I’m in the same room with these two little guys, I feel serene in an unprecedented manner. Perhaps because kids are the answer to the problem of lost time. I’ve recently came to realize that parents manage to achieve the unthinkable: Overcoming their subjective, personal time by creating their biological extension. Kids are immortality by proxy. It seems that my brother is much wiser than me and the -living- proof stands before my eyes. It’s not that I don’t want to have children. But my evasive nature and abnormal fear of responsibility never allowed my love for kids to become realized in the form of an offspring. There is a word for this aversion to accountability: hypengyophobia; a word of Greek extraction that could have been tattooed on my forehead since my childhood years. But truth be told, something has changed inside me since my nephews were born. It’s as if now I can have a free taste of how it feels to shape the personalities of other human beings and galvanize their identities. There is something gratifying about this mechanism that may be derived from the simple fact that the subject who channels the patterns and symbols to the kids becomes himself reinvented and transformed in the process. The mother and father will never be the same since their children are born. From then on, everything in their lives happens in relation to their descendants. It is the children who provide meaning to their parents’ existence and in return, they receive nurturing care, and everything associated with a smooth upbringing. Death is no longer needed to transform life into a destiny. The Grim Reaper yields at the sight of the innocent kids’ grace; its glaring light blinds and evicts the forces of darkness.
I reach to my brother’s left ear and whisper: “They are worth dying for, aren’t they?” He turns his head to look me in the eye as he agrees: “Yes, bro, they are.” It’s time for the family photo. I never grasped why people are so keen to immortalize even the most trivial of moments. Yet, the kids are here, so everything acquires a whole new meaning. Three generations in one picture. The elderly grandmother, the two brothers in their forties, and the two youngsters whose age is measured in single-digit numbers. My brother does his magic with the camera and soon we are all putting on the warmest of smiles for the lens. I take a look at the snapshot, and I can’t help laughing as I see Alex sporting a massive chocolate stain that stretches from his upper lip all the
way down to his chin. I then focus on my brother’s grey hair and my silver beard. As long as the kids are alright, we can both keep the passion alive and that’s the answer to the question of aging. It’s my birthday today. The birthday of a new era for me and my loved ones. Away from the traumas of the past and the torment of indolence. Happy birthday to us all.