but you have to host the scars. Out wandering on the vale of doom that’s my forties, I’ve learned that I no longer mend as I did as a kid. When I pick up some malady or clunk nowadays I don’t clear it completely, it’s as though the body knows it will have to carry some remnant ache or knobble from future blows and molecular assaults, can’t shrug them off as before. The bar’s dropped and I begin to understand how I might never clamber free from the elephant pit of a serious illness or smash, not get back all that was lost. And that makes me wish I’d burned brighter in footloose years, knowing the invincibility of youth was sand falling in a turned glass and the get out of jail card of shiny rejuvenation would be snatched away. That sand falls for every one of us. And the numbers are hidden, spinning, ungraspable until the moment they always foretold arrives.
