"Swy"

Growing older. But you don’t keep growing. Well, apparently your ears and your nose never stop growing.
Maybe your soul, or whatever a person should call it,
keeps growing too.
Old is wrinkles.
Unless for you old means money, in which case you can buy new skin without wrinkles.
No slinky of skin drooping around your neck anymore.
No irregular and oval dark spots on your hands.
And you’d still have dark hair.
I don’t want to be older if it means that.
You feel like nothing changes.
Your clothes fit the same when you turn a year older.
Your face doesn’t change.
Maybe the look in your eyes changes.
I think we grow in between, or rather, in between is when growing happens.
What will it be like?
Old. Aren’t we all old?
At least some number of years old.
When you’re born,
0 years old smells like the sterile hospital room and the bright lights you came into the world in.
3 or 5 years old smells like birthday cake or burnt out candles.
Maybe 12 smells like grass and sparkly Chapstick. Dr. Pepper flavored that is.
And 16 smells like the exhaust cloud that used to shoot out the back of that beater of a car you used to drive.
21 smells like beer, and maybe whatever damp smells linger into your nostrils.
I remember most what 21 smells like.
Just like “wheat soda”.
And it tasted like fizzy piss,
At least when all the good stuff is gone.