Bare

Bare

I stand without cover,

no shine, no mask.

Just skin,

lined and soft,

telling stories I didn’t ask to write.

Time whispers—

you’re fading,

but I am not afraid.

To be real is to be naked,

and I am still here.

I did not know age would arrive like this. Not as a single moment, not as a ceremony, but as a slow erosion. A quiet, persistent wearing down that reshapes you before you notice it has begun. I did not understand how fiercely I wanted to live until death leaned close enough to be intimate, close enough to speak without raising its voice.

Now when I look in the mirror, I hesitate. The woman looking back carries a face I do not fully recognize. Lines settle where softness used to live. The body feels less like shelter and more like a system I am learning to negotiate. Inside it, my mind still moves quickly, still hungry, still alert, and sometimes it feels trapped, rattling against bone and skin that no longer answer the way they once did.

I think about how much I have demanded of this body. How casually I spent it. The nights I burned through it without concern for morning. The mornings I blamed it for surviving what I asked it to endure. I pushed it toward edges and then resented it for trembling there. And yet, it kept standing. It kept breathing when I did not know how to want to.

The strange part is not that the body changes. It is that it remembers. It carries every wound, every chemical, every reckless season, every choice I once called freedom. Memory lives in muscle and tissue long after the mind has edited the story. The body does not forget what it was used for.

And still it carries me.

It carries me into rooms I once thought I would never see again. Into mornings that arrive quietly instead of violently. Into a future that feels thinner, but also more deliberate. Survival no longer looks heroic. It looks careful. It looks awake.

I used to think aging meant losing something essential. Now I suspect it means discovering what was real enough to stay. Not the speed. Not the illusion of invincibility. But the simple, stubborn fact of presence. Breath following breath. A body that has been hurt and still agrees to move forward.

There is a humility in realizing you are alive not because you were careful, but because you were carried. By skin. By bone. By systems you once ignored. By a body that kept going even when your mind flirted with disappearance.

I stand in front of the mirror longer now. Not to judge. To witness. To recognize the quiet labor happening beneath the surface. This body is not beautiful in the way youth promised. It is beautiful in the way endurance teaches.

It remembers. It adapts. It stays.

And so do I.