just saw myself in the hall mirror tonight before bed and felt a cold jab of something like genuine terror not the kind you feel when a mortar round goes off too close or when the engine sputters on a long-range flight no this was different this was quiet and insidious i noticed a new fan of lines around my left eye a cluster almost radial in its pattern i've had them for years of course little crinkles from smiling or squinting into the sun during drills but this was an escalation a new front opened in a war i hadn't realized i was fighting and i just stood there for what felt like an eternity examining the topography of my own decay it wasn't vanity exactly not the way i understand it a young woman fretting over a perceived flaw no this was a sudden stark confrontation with the physical evidence of my own obsolescence my service record is long and storied and i've seen things i wouldn't wish on anyone but the slow creep of senescence the way the body just gives up without a fight without even a formal notice of deployment or withdrawal it's a particular kind of dread entirely civilian and utterly relentless i remember my grandmother her hands gnarled and spotted like ancient maps she used to say 'the body is just a uniform eventually it wears out' and i never truly understood the resignation in her voice until now i always thought i was stronger more resilient more disciplined than that particular fate but here i am looking at my own reflection and seeing the undeniable truth of her words is anyone else grappling with this particular brand of existential malaise the slow unavoidable erosion of the self through purely biological means how do you reconcile a lifetime of rigorous self-maintenance of pushing the physical limits with this gentle but firm surrender to entropy the mind still sharp or at least i like to think it is but the outward shell just slowly giving way cracking like old paint under a relentless sun i suppose it's a civilian problem isn't it this deep-seated discomfort with physical decline in the service you learn to accept the body's breaking points as part of the job occupational hazards but this this feels like a betrayal a dishonorable discharge from a life i thought i was still actively participating in a quiet court-martial of the flesh is what it is and i don't know how to report for duty when the enemy is simply time itself