Faded Shards

I stood knee deep in the icy Pacific, not caring that the sun filtering through the fog was burning my shoulders. The water pushed and swirled around me as the tide made it's steadfast way higher and higher up the beach. My back ached and my quads burned from my bent position. Every few minutes, I thrust my hands into the water and pulled up a handful of pebbles, sifting through them to find the treasured sea glass.

This new obsession is still exercising its siren call. I stood in the water on my birthday and ran my thumb along the frosted and worn edges of glass. I worried the smooth edges with my fingers, drawing comfort in its texture. That same shard might have sliced my fingers when it was newer, shiner. It might have drawn blood if I stepped on it. It might have shattered into even smaller pieces if I'd dropped it.

I'm thirty-nine.

I'm staring forty in the face and the very idea of a number, a date on the calendar, irrationally terrifies me. Nancy called it the Forty Faultline, that crack in our story and life that opens like a vast crevice. I'm surrounded by youth in all its glory. Students with their youthful enthusiasm. New teachers with their smooth, unlined skin and smiling confidence. 

I remember my 29th birthday. I remember feeling as if my life was on track. I'd figured out this thing called "being a grown up". I was married to a man I loved madly, in a job I performed well, surrounded by friends who I adored, and had a body that could still wear short skirts.

Perhaps some of my apprehension is not so much fear of being older, but, rather, fear that ten years later, I've somehow gone in reverse in so many ways and fast forward in others. I wake up in the morning, feeling youth infuse me. I get out of bed with muscles sore from exercise - more sore than they would have been a decade ago. I move to the shower and see a woman with a sagging body. The lines around my eyes are deepening and the skin is slower to heal.

Those lines, I tell myself, are laugh lines, showing the joy of my life.

That skin, I tell myself, is stretched and pulled from carrying two healthy children. 

On a good day, I see the soft beauty of being slightly faded and worn around the edges. 

On a bad day, I miss the sharp sparkle of new glass.