Drooping eyelids

This morning, still half asleep, I looked in the mirror and saw an elderly man with slightly drooping eyelids. It was the first time I had noticed them, and they stirred conflicting feelings: surprise, shock, and even a certain disbelief.

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But above all, there was triumph. When I was diagnosed with HIV in 1987, I was thirty-three. I hardly dared imagine a future beyond the next eighteen months. If, back then, someone had offered me the chance to become an old man with a paunch and slightly drooping eyelids, I would have signed up in tears of joy. The wrinkles, the crow's feet, my bald head—they are trophies of a battle I won against all odds.

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Then there is my vanity. Looking as good as possible is a pressure I put on myself. Not only because I enjoy a compliment, though that certainly plays a role, but because looking unkempt feels like surrender. My inner voice still insists there is nothing worse than complacency. Looking sloppy would be proof that I have let myself go.

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I have been wrestling with this contradiction for some time. I’m grateful to have reached seventy-two, yet I’m still adjusting to what growing older actually looks like. The irony is that, since starting a new generation of HIV medication five years ago, the chronic fatigue that plagued me for decades has diminished considerably. Physically and mentally, I feel better than I did a decade ago.

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The person I feel myself to be no longer matches the face looking back at me. Am I the man who wakes up full of energy, eager to write, travel and begin new projects? Or the old man with the almost drooping eyelids reflected in the mirror?

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It doesn’t really matter. Why should I need to identify as either one?

Instead, wouldn't it be wonderful to go through life as a surfer on the waves. Not forcing a direction, not analyzing every swell, but responding instinctively, carried by wind and water. Better still, to be the wave itself: rising, curling, dissolving, only to become part of the ocean again.                                                                                                                                    

That would take care of the drooping eyelids as well.