Building a Still (In Brazos)

“I’m about to turn 30.”

In a college town, where the kids look freed from shrinkwrap, saying your age is like copping to an airborne herpes anyone can catch. Even though the only people who care are the 25-year-olds. They use “us” and “we” talking with you. 

It’s not just the age. You exercise, avoid poison, hustle with the kids you work with. But you’re a prime buck checking IDs and throwing out fawns that were in diapers when you first heard this song on the radio—the one where he settles for a burger and a grape snow cone—the one this kid is singing too loud while falling and puking on his date.

“Fuck you, you fucking douchebag!” he yells, the river of youth swirling around him on the sidewalk. Tonight he’s a maroon-faced pain in the taint, but he’ll get his BS in Engineering, find work on an oil rig, marry some other girl and make more money than you ever will a year or two before you got your act together.

“Shut it,” says your benevolent roommate (same age), tossing green beans to flank your birthday ribeye. “Choose the happy. Choose it. You can.”

And you wish she was the 22-year-old bartender with the same hobbies and name as the girl you almost married, horizontally glistening under slivers of moonlight. Wisdom and assurance (however self-indulgent) at 4 a.m.

But redemption is neither a fledgling beauty nor a labor of love. It’s being too old in a town too young, knowing that each second is a penny flung into a cosmic well.