when i'm sixty-four.

When I get older, losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a Valentine?
Birthday greetings, a bottle of wine?
If I'd been out till quarter to three,
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me?
- When I'm sixty-four.

You'll be older too,
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating your point of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say,
Yours sincerely, wasting away.
Give me an answer, fill in a form,
Mine for evermore.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me?
- When I'm sixty-four.

When I'm Sixty-Four
The Beatles



i came across the lyrics to this song while reading Love Life by Ray Kluun. it's a really good read - but damn sad. i'm up to the part where Carmen the wife discovers she has breast cancer, and Dan the husband tries to be a good husband but struggles to love his wife the way she needs him to. several times throughout the book, i started to tear cos it's such a human struggle. so real. to love someone properly, unconditionally. to not love the person for his or her youth and exuberence, but love the person for who he or she really is.

i think too many people in this world today are in love with youth. i think sometimes that i am, too. i want to be remembered as who i am right now when i die in 2058. as young, healthy, beautiful - alive and passionate. i don't want to be remembered as old and hunched and sick and weak and grey and toothless. when i die, i want to live on in people's minds the way i am now, not the semblence of me i will become when i age. it's too sad, how aging inevitably strips away life, sucks away life. why can't i die as i am today, without having to change into someone physically unrecognisable in 50 years time? in the end, i think it's all got to do with vanity. if the physical appearance is really just a shell, i should be able to relinquish my beauty and health, as long as the soul within remains whole. God gave me what i have physically, i suppose He can take it back and do what He wants to it in time.

it doesn't really make sense to me though. why would God want to sunder His beautiful creations? i'm not saying that all old people are hideous, but it is a fact that aging is not exactly a pretty process. diseases and sickness set in in old age, skin sags, teeth fall out, hair falls out. maybe there's a lesson here for me to learn, that sagging skin can be beautiful as well, that beauty is reallyreally subjective.

as Carmen and Dan in Love Life i'm reading now, i'm struggling myself, too, with what i can't exactly elaborate on here. i'm tired of being in a perpertual struggle, though, so i stop thinking of myself as 'struggling'. but at the end of the day, everyone struggles with something - and i have to quit lying to myself about my okay-ness.

everybody hurts. i'm not trying to overgeneralise and simplify everybody's pain into that all-encompassing statement. but it's a fact.

i'm on my way to choosing to live with the hurt, to not do anything about it anymore and resolve not to try to do anything. if it's not this thing that hurts, something or the other will eventually. so live with it. emotional pain never really leaves you, but it subsides and recedes into the recesses of your heart and mind. my heart and mind. unless provoked, it doesn't bother me. the only times when it gets to me and makes me want to do something is when i reach within myself to pull it out and talk about it, give form to it once again, breathe life to it once again. it becomes really difficult to chuck it back to where it all came from whenever i give life to my hurts, but i always eventually manage to.

i could let myself stay lost and inundated in my past. it's all-too-easy, and i know i'm perfectly capable of doing that. i see things that people cannot see, faraway in the horizon. i hear things that no one else hears in my own head. okay so i sound like i'm possessed. but isn't that what my past really is - a ghost that haunts me? my past, it floats silently and stealthily in the corridors of my mind and heart, and it bothers me when i face up to it.

many would say that this is a clear sign that all is not well in my life and i have to do something about it. but do i really? the last time i did, i just made things worse for myself. it still dogs me, that particular memory. the shittiness i felt was unmatched before that point. when i think about it, i can feel my heartbeat quickening, my eyes tearing up, my head hurting, my heart breaking - still. it's like falling all over again. who says that this time round, it's gonna be any different? i know it won't be.

i want to run run run, away from it all. but i'm realistic enough to know that running away won't solve anything. staying put might be the elusive answer.