Not long ago I visited a state where marijuana was legalized and decided to take an edible for a spin. Not a regular user of drugs, a little bit threw my  mind and body intensely. I recall life feeling like it was this movie on top of a movie on top of a movie — layered where everything I said one second just poof disappeared the next and I was in a new frame, a different movie, constantly confirming with others around me that indeed I had just said what I thought I said, if I even remembered. Everything in life a quickly flashing animation in a Zoetrope with nothing real at all. That feeling of all these simultaneously occurring instances that may or may not have been real was not only overwhelming, but it also took on its own allegorical reflection of life, its own moments flipping through as memories with no sense of solid time or place or even assured reality.

I feel old. I know I’m only turning 31 but the world around me isn’t getting any younger. My grandfather is severely ill right now and likely only has days or weeks to live. It just so happens I’m on the east coast this week so I have the luxury of seeing him alive at least one last time but this retched cold is preventing my admittance to the hospital nonetheless. My father who fell on himself this week and managed not to break any bones but to bruise himself severely seems to have picked up on his typical frustration vented at my mother anytime she so much as asks a question. I long to be there for my dad as I know he is not only facing his own imminent death due to cancer but now watching his father go through the final turns at the wheel. It seems the most unfortunate to see anyone in your family go through the strokes of death and yet that is something all of us share in common, our mortality, and our immortal moments as others fall forever while we get to live on, at least for now.

All the meanwhile I’m attempting to make sense of these two job offers and looking at my own very fragile mental state, leaning back and forth towards each depending on the intensity and angle on the sun, so it seems. That said the second offer hasn’t come in officially yet but I’ve been told I’m one of two to candidates and they seem to be expediting my offer since I told them I received another one. All of the stress has led me to boiling numbers in my head into the wee hours of the night and unable to sleep, getting myself sicker and sicker. I ought to be frolicking in the fields or something right now. I genuinely see this time as the end of my youth. I know – 30 isn’t exactly youth but today there is something about our 20s – inclusive of 30 – which are time to find ourselves and explore. And then there is 31. What is 31? It’s not much different than 30 and yet it is. It is when you’re IN your 30s. Your next major milestone is 40 and 40 is perhaps half your life is you’re lucky and less if you’re not. 40 is (probably) too late to have kids of your own and so your life path is set (unless you adopt of course) and you’re really at 40 preparing for the end of it all while working your ass off and trying to retain whatever piece of yourself you can in moments you can sing along loudly to a song from your actual youth while driving too and from work or to pick up the kids.

And in this crisp fall air I taste this seasonal transition of my life. I am, the heavens know, no longer any remnant of a child. I am a could-be mother, a would-be carer, a want-to-be producer of life. I am a woman caught up in a thousand vines staring down the rest of my time on earth, the rest of my time on earth with my loved ones and trying to grasp at preparations for the loss of others before my own end. If anything tells me that I’m now an adult and not a child is that I’ve started to fear the deaths of others more than my own. Every night I close my eyes and accept if this is it then it is, but being awake and aware of the passing of any once vibrant life is jarring to any human soul, no matter how much tragedy it has witnessed through its life. I, for one, have never even been to a funeral yet. At 31.

The taste of sick permeates my tongue down to my throat and into my salty, swollen lungs which breathe heavily and slow. I see the tree leaves unaware of their fate soon coming, the changing of the colors, their rotting out and falling to the ground in piles little unassuming children will bunch and jump into with no awareness of their own mortality or the death of life to birth yet another winter, only that of crunchy caress of motley-hued leaves.

I am having a lot of trouble processing everything. Yet for once I think I have a handle on the trouble itself. Maybe that’s a start.