The Empress of Aging. The Vein in My Hand.

It’s 7 o’clock in the evening, the kind of soft light that makes you notice things you might otherwise miss. I sat down to read The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, Oprah’s Book of the Month. Her interview with him made me wish he were my brother. Or that I could have dinner with him just once and ask a million questions. But I’ll settle for the book. I read the second sentence in the second paragraph three times.

“But it’s beautiful here. Even the ghosts agree, mornings when the light rinses this place the shade of oatmeal, they rise as mist over the rye across the tracks and stumble toward the black spired pines, searching for their names, names that no longer live in any living thing’s mouth.”

Three times? I still didn’t get it. The shade of oatmeal? A bit pretentious, aren’t we?

But then I noticed something else. My hand was pressed flat across the paper, and for the first time I could see the entire outline of a vein. Like an old person’s hand, where the skin no longer serves as a blanket, hiding the inner workings none of us worry about until they start to need maintenance. I kept staring at it. Then I turned it slightly and realized it looked like a mountain, rising from the base on one side, arcing to the top, then curving down the other side to the bottom. Oh my God. Is that the entire lifeline of the vein? How many more times will my blood pass through it, carrying me to the next thing I have to do today? What the fuck.

Then I lifted my hand and made a fist, and thank God, I couldn’t see the whole vein anymore. The top of my hand looked flat again. It didn’t seem translucent anymore. But I opened my hand again, and when I placed it back on the page, there it was. The outlines of three bones could also be seen, tethered to my wrist but heading down toward my fingers.

Just a few months ago, I was having lunch with a friend the same age as me when she remarked that my hands don’t have age spots. I joked that they probably do, just hidden under the darker blotches from all those high school vacations in the Caribbean. Not only does my skin not sag, but my hands don’t look old at all. OK, I know what you’re thinking. If I lost the weight I’m carrying, they probably would. And that’s true. But there’s always a silver lining, and mine happens to be fat.

But my hands aren’t fat. And they aren’t wrinkled. And my knuckles don’t have even a millimeter of arthritic swelling, though yes, sometimes they ache just a bit in the morning now.

I’m in my 70s. That still surprises me when I say it out loud. But my hair is thick, and my voice doesn’t have that papery crackle some people get with age. Not yet.

And the people in my family, who worry about others just a few years older than me, don’t seem to think of me in that category. When I point out that I am, they wave it off. “I don’t think of you that way,” they say.

But if I lay my hand flat on the table during lunch, will they start to? Do I need to remember to keep it curled in a fist?

And if they can see through skin that’s becoming more translucent by the day, will they also see beneath it, to the mistakes I’ve made in this life? Will they see what I thought I had hidden, but probably never did? Does it matter?

Should I take a picture of my hand each week, in the same position, just to track the changes, the countdown to the end?

I wonder, do the people who came before me remember the moment their hands began to look old? I have friends who noticed every wrinkle that appeared on their face. I did not. And I have plenty of wrinkles now. I have friends who spotted the first gray hair and marked the occasion. I didn’t care when mine started to show. I had a bunch of friends who actually kidnapped me one day and took me to get my hair dyed, which I’ll never forgive them for. Because once you start that process, you can never stop. Thirty-five years later and I’m still contending with that abduction.

I think I could’ve been one of those cool salt and pepper women who walk the earth like they’re totally at ease with aging. Instead, people think I’m ten years younger than I am.

OK, I have to get back to the book. I need to move past the fact that I’m annoyed by his second paragraph. I wonder how long it took him to write that sentence. Did he really need all of it?

Couldn’t he have just said the light shone gently on the shore? Did he really have to bring in oatmeal? And do I really need to worry about the tributaries running through my body, carrying me so steadily for so many years without a single major shutdown or repair?

Let them shine through. Let everyone see how beautiful the intersections are, how efficiently they’ve gotten me from place to place, every single day, for 72 years. And, move past the oatmeal. It’s only one word in thousands.