When I became engaged to James, the age gap between us did not seem so great. I fancied myself unusually mature at nineteen, and James’ weekends on the soccer pitch made him in better shape at twenty-eight than my love for gelato would ever allow me to reach. My friends teased me about the gap, and my mother warned me about it, but I ignored all of them. A mere nine years can do little to dissuade a young woman in love.
I didn't notice the difference the next year, when James and I danced on our wedding night. I didn't think about the gap when I gave birth to our son three years after. The night when I found my first silver hair and cried for half an hour, James simply laughed and informed me he had started going grey years ago. I called him an idiot, but it secretly made me feel better. The extent of the gap between us was confined solely to his scalp.
No, I wasn't really impacted by our age gap until the first we visited the gerontologist. What a quaint word: “gerontologist”. This was a long time ago, and back then our contemporary title of “immortalist” was still only used as a slur by the life-extension skeptics. And I counted myself among their number. I don’t think I would have seriously gone if it wasn't for James. He took research seriously from the outset; he told me that if we passed up the opportunity we would regret it for the rest of our short lives.
We went to the gerontologists and agreed to the most aggressive rounds of anti-aging treatment they offered. I started noticing results a few months in. No longer was I exhausted when I took the stairs to my office. I effortlessly slimmed down a pants size as my metabolism sped to the rate I had forgotten myself capable of. My crow’s feet, which I had tried so often to hide under cosmetics and creams, simply melted away. It was like watching sand getting sucked back up an hourglass: for me, it was nothing short of magic.
It was not so miraculous for James. One year after we started the treatments we celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary. I felt thirty myself. James, though, felt his age.
We had been warned that this could happen from the outset. Those nine extra years James had lived contained countless instances of cell atrophy, genetic mutations, and excess stress. Each frayed telomere made it ever-so-slightly more difficult for the gerontologist to turn back the clock. James’ initial odds for success were barely a fifth of my own. In fact, I was so skeptical of the treatments that I had brushed off and forgotten that initial warning. I only remembered it after a hike in the mountains, and seeing James bend over wheezing when I hardly had broken a sweat.
And so I grew younger as James grew older, and quietly watched as our age gap of nine years turn to ten, then eleven, then twelve, and eventually, to forty.
James was a member of the last generation that had to face their own mortality. I had skipped my sixtieth college reunion to care for him, in the end. He was bedridden and confused. In a moment of lucidity, though, he reached out a shriveled, trembling hand to me. I held it. Slowly, raspily, he said that I was as beautiful to him now as I had been the day we had met.
He was right.
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