I Hope They Let Us Get Old
I hope we can get old.
Together is less important to me, should we have to go our separate ways but old. Old.
This is not to say that there won’t be problems with age,
But as I see us here, laughing between bottles of rum and sweet juice
and telling how neither one of us are sure our rents will be paid
or that our bodies are continuing to hurt in more perilous ways and not finding a single ounce of relief,
I know we laugh at it and say “we’ll ain’t that just how it is” but I don’t know how many more times we can laugh it off before it stops being funny.
If it’s not our health, it’s our wealth,
An accidental fire we might not escape,
Or a system that won’t let us.
Or some angry man’s hand
Who has determined that because he won’t see next week,
he’ll see to it that we don’t too.
Something different collapsing every week.
I pray to a god I do not believe in that it will not be us next week.
Or the other millions of things that keep hounding my door.
Maybe getting old is a rich man’s game.
I know they feel it.
Like a steady and unrelenting giant wall of inky, black fog
crawling behind us;
You can’t see past it,
but you know that it consumes everything in its poor path.
Too many have passed already,
Too many with faces and laughter and juice like ours
taken by that fog.
I know I was told as a child
that you only ever need to be the second-fastest,
but No. No. No. That cannot be true.
But I see my friends,
who walk slower than they should,
barely trotting along, falling behind.
Dead men walking.
God, I hope they let us get old.
Jordan Gaona-Wilson
(pronouns: they/them/theirs) is a 24-year-old multidisciplinary artist with a focus on writing and painting. Jordan is Afro-Latinx, non-binary, queer, trans, and chronically-ill/disabled. Because of how their identities intersect with different communities, discussions within them inform much of the work they do.