the difference between rot and decay

note: this post was originally from our stillness, a now defunct blogging project.

Something I've been thinking about recently is how my dad has always been recording home videos of my sister and I. Even now, though the mediums have definitely changed.

I remember an old camcorder hanging from an aluminum shelf in my mom's then-office. It was dusty and out of commission, and by the time I was lucid enough to notice it, my dad had already moved onto a slightly more updated digital point-and-shoot. I had one of my own at the time, but I dropped it in a pool of seawater, and the memory was promptly destroyed.

My dad uses his smartphone to record us now, posting the videos unlinked on an anonymous YouTube channel. I'm not in those videos as much anymore, as I’ve become distant and busy and less inclined to dance in front of the camera. I guess I have the same modernity to thank for that.

I've been feeling the passage of time a lot more lately. So many more search queries about medical issues I didn't know existed. So many more doctor visits. I’m severely allergic to seven different kinds of grass, and my liver is incapable of handling stress.

I miss the body and mind I had when I was 19. I'm not much older, but everything felt snappier back then. More responsive. I hooked up with someone who recently had his 20th birthday, and I no longer possessed the desire nor the means to retaliate back and forth with him in banter. The stuff I say is earnest now. Mediocre now. I don't want or have the energy to be interesting. Perhaps I've been freed. Or convicted.

Lots of people from earlier periods of my life have been reaching back out. I get drinks and takeout with them like how we used to when we first got our driver's licenses. I'm not the same, but nothing has changed. I steamed a whole tilapia for the first time in 13 years and ate it alone at my kitchen table. In a sense, I was having dinner with my younger self, who also ate alone when they tried making the same dish for the first time.

I feel myself bridging in and out of my enmeshed selves within the same body, the same mind. As the things I’ve thought to be certain about myself continue to flake off of me, I've been trying to hold on to whatever convictions and principles are left of my character. I can't take weed or alcohol without issue anymore, and today I'm visiting a warehouse to shop for rugs. Rugs.

I am most definitely dying.