It took a walk through CVS to remind me that I will die someday. The medicine aisle was bad, but it was the skin care aisle that did it for me. I looked in the tiny mirror on the reading glasses rack and could see the wrinkles forming in the corners of my eyes. I felt them.

My skin soaked up the eight dollars, but I didn't feel any less mortal. I asked the CVS woman what I should do next to protect my skin from wrinkles.

You're so young, she said.

But that wasn't the question. She wouldn't know, wouldn't understand that every moment the sun slowly burns my skin cells, that I'm old, as old as I feel. And some days I can barely roll out of bed.

Some days.

Other days I can hardly walk, some days I can barely speak or smile or have the drive to think beyond tomorrow. Some people joke that I'm an old woman because I like to knit with my cats, other people say I have my entire life ahead of me.

I can dress up to go out. Put on my black tights and knee high boots and a strapless dress and hairspray my hair in curls so that I look the same for hours. This is how I hide my age, I'm young and sexy, come talk to me, drink with me, love me.

But when no one is around, the wrinkles come out. My face is pale and my bangs hang limp in my face as if I just walked through a freezing rain storm, lost on my way somewhere. I think about people I have lost. I think about myself and the spark I lost. The desire, the passion.

I'm in love right now. With what I won't say, but it's dying and I don't have the strength to revive it on my own. I'm the old woman on the bench waiting for the bus, the elderly man in the diner at 5 AM, waiting for his loved ones to come. But what I love is gone, and I am gone.

---Meredith

Hiding

I'm supposed to "describe myself in 200 words." I don't know what they want to know. What would I want to know about myself? Not as much as I do. So I'm going to make a list of phrases here, and maybe string some together into some description of me right now.

Overgrown curly hair and fingernails. Listening to Julie Doiron by myself, waiting for a text message that won't come. Writer who never has anything important to say. Has two cats. Too much coffee. Cries whenever I hear the national anthem. 125 pounds. Afraid of nothing until after I've done it. High school graduate. Silently irritated by the "go meat" commercial. Three pairs of thrift store shoes. Thinks about people that don't know me very well. Running away from my image but running into it again wherever I go. Perfect grades. Socializes better with people who don't know me. Still waiting for that text message.

I don't know what's wrong with me tonight. I think it's all the alone time, without school for the past two weeks. If I were someone else and I hadn't seen a friend in two weeks, I'd be excited to get a text message from that person. It would make my day. I don't understand a lot of people. I would never tell someone I was going to hang out with them then never show up without calling and apologizing first. It makes me feel like there's something wrong and incredibly unappealing about me. But I guess everyone feels that way sometimes, and they don't feel the need to dwell on it like I do.

I need a haircut and a cheesecake blizzard and a belief system that doesn't revolve around me.

I want someone unexpected to call me right now.

I just want to watch a movie with someone.

I want too much.