I Woke Up with Someone Else’s Neck

A strange thing happened this morning. I woke up with someone else’s neck. I looked in the mirror. Then looked again. Overnight, I had become collared with wrinkles. What the heck. How did this happen? Just yesterday, my skin was smooth and elastic.

I vaguely remember hearing in my youth, “When you apply skin lotion, don’t forget your neck.” I was too busy applying baby-oil to bake in the sun with tin-foil reflectors.

Speaking of tin-foil, I heard crinkly cellophane in my shoulder today when I raised my arm to touch the dry, creased ridges under my chin. While they depressed me, I couldn’t depress them. They were rigid. As if rigor-mortised.

I threw my head back in disgust and spied, in the mirror, protruding nose hairs. White ones.

I’ve noticed my knees speak to me when I climb the stairs - to which I had formerly attributed the creaking.

We’re not even going to talk about the bunions on my feet…

… except to say, on my right foot, one has stuck out so far, I need a bigger shoe-size and on the left, I swear to God, another one sprouted overnight. Literally. Overnight. And up. Not out. Like a mushroom.

I told my eye doctor, during my check-up, “Last week while driving at night, flashes, like streaks of lightning, zipped down on the outside of my right eye. Now bubbles float by, so close I want to reach out and pop them. And tiny black specks come and go.”

“It means your vitreous has pulled away from your retina.”

I refrained from telling him, “The visions remind me of fun drugs I took in college.” Instead, I said, “My contacts don’t fit like they used to.”

“That’s because you’re aging and your eyeballs are receding.”

Really? Oh my God. My eyeballs are receding? Into my skull. I’m starting to resemble the skeleton I will eventually become.

Thank God, I do yoga. What if I didn’t? I don’t even want to think about how far gravity would have had its way with me by now.

And then, there’s the fatigue. When I was a kid, wasn’t that what Geritol was for? You know, for old folks in their forties and fifties. Hmm. Where I used to rake the whole lawn, I now approach it a square at a time, as if piecing together a quilt… like the one I drape over my cold shins.

I tried clipping my toe-nails last week. First, I had to reach them… Then, I had to cut them… Ever try snipping thick sheet metal with dull shears?

At a party, John and I saw our old friend, Keith. He sat with us to catch up.

“I used to set my bottles of medicine to one side of my plate,” Keith said. “Then, after I took my pills, I moved them to the other side. Now I ask myself, ‘Did I move them without taking any?’”

“In the shower, if I drop the soap,” John said, “I have to bend over to pick it up. When I stand back up, I can’t remember if I’ve washed my hair.”

We laughed. Then Keith stood to leave.

“Hey Keith, it’s great to see you. Why don’t you sit down for a minute so we can visit?”

Beckie O’Neill