Pushing

Written last week during a fit of insomnia, and delivered against my better judgement into the cruel hands of the internet:

On my twenty-sixth birthday, I joked that I was "pushing thirty". It was a casual, throwaway technicality, designed to poke fun at the neuroses of those nearer to the mark, borne of an arrogance only possible because my own senescence was a hypothetical whose realization I had never confronted. Now, scant years later I am, unequivocally, pushing thirty. No longer merely discernible on the horizon, it hurtles toward me (or I toward it) relentlessly, and I—fattening, incipiently balding, cognitively ossifying—scrabble for handholds as my horizontal trajectory tilts savagely to vertical, seeing not only the mark but the headlong path beyond it, hanging momentarily weightless at the precipice as fear and anxiety are swallowed up in a single, overriding despair:

I don't want to die.