TheMBC

I was going to throw this away, it was a creative peace and the instructions where to imitate the short story "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros, but I thought maybe you guys would like to read it...or not.

---------------

"Sixty-Four"

What I don’t understand about birthdays is that when you’re sixty-four everyone begins to tell you that age is just a number, but what they don’t want to tell you is that at the same time you aren’t just sixty-four, you’re sixty-three, sixty-two, and so on until you’re one. If they’d tell you, then you’d have to act as if you are 18 and able to do harsh physical movement without passing out - or any type of movement for that matter. When you wake up on your sixty-fourth birthday you expect to feel that age, but you don’t. You feel older. You feel like you’re eighty, because everyone around you just seems so jubilant. Somehow, you also feel like you’re 21, and you are -- underneath the tens of years that make you sixty-four.

Like some days you might say something stupid because you just finished binge drinking because it’s the first time you’ve ever drank, and that’s the part of you that’s 21 -- or that’s the part of you that’s senile, I’m not sure. Maybe some days you need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared and you go to see her and realize she doesn’t remember you, so you begin to cry, and that’s the part of you that’s sixty, and you don’t cry because she can’t remember you, you cry because you can’t remember that she doesn’t remember you.

Because the way you grow old is kind of how like when you are in a boring conversation and it finally ends. You don’t know what happened or how you got to the end, but you nodded your way through. That’s how being sixty-four is.

You feel sixty-four, right away, even before being sixty-four. It takes a few days, weeks, months, even a few drinks before you can lie to yourself and think you’re younger or the correct age.

Only today I wish I didn’t have sixty-four years crammed inside me like people squished into a public bus. Today I wish I was 30 or another age instead of sixty-four because if I was 30 I’d have known that I should’ve spoken when my nurse gave me medicine that apparently was not mine instead of just sitting there thinking I was Ruth McDonald and I was supposed to be taking Zoloft and Vytorin.

“Here you are Ruth,” says the nurse, and she gave me a little cup with the two pills. “Hurry up and take them.”

“I’m not Ruth,” I tell her.

“Well you have to be Ruth McDonald. This is room 230,” she kept repeating. I could’ve sworn my name is Nell Grey, but she’s the nurse and she must be right. So I just stood there looking at the cup, as she walked out of the room, and swallowed them.

I don’t know why but all of a sudden I’m feeling a little drowsy…usually my medicine doesn’t make me drowsy. But the drowsiness goes away and I remember that today is my birthday, so I begin to get sick. Another year older, as if I need that on my life resume.

But before my family comes to visit me, that stupid nurse comes in and begins to yell at me saying that I’m not Ruth and that I should not swallow the medicine, but I already did. That’s when the part of me that’s 30 comes up because it was boiling inside of me while she was yelling and I begin to scream back telling her how she could have gotten the room wrong if she works here. And then I’m done, and I feel like I can’t even breathe, but the nurse just apologizes and acts as if nothing she did was wrong.

Today I am sixty-four. There’s cake my family is making for me and bringing to me. There’ll be candles, pastries, and presents, and everybody will sing: “Happy birthday to you…Nell,” and it doesn‘t matter how bad today is or was.

I’m sixty-four today, and the part of me that feels seventy or eighty knows that by tomorrow I would’ve forgotten everything that happened today.