i watched him try to catch their eyes at lunch again today it was like seeing a robin trying to crack open a rock with its beak over and over and over just the same patient futility i wanted to reach across the table and squeeze his arm or something anything to pull him out of that quiet sinking feeling i could practically taste the dust on his tongue when he talked about his work the same way you taste the dust in an old unused room after a grandparent passes it just hangs there heavy and forgotten he was speaking about these groundbreaking studies from the seventies studies that laid the entire foundation for what they’re doing now and they just kept talking over him about some new hotshot’s paper a paper that wouldn’t exist if it weren't for the man sitting right there asking for a sliver of their attention a crumb and it made me so furious not at them though maybe a little bit but mostly at myself for just sitting there letting it happen i felt that familiar hot spike behind my eyes that means i’m about to scream or cry and i just squeezed my hands under the table digging my nails into my palms until it dulled to a low throb in my wrists it’s the same feeling i get when i have to explain to my mom for the tenth time that her sister isn’t coming home because she died years ago it’s that raw impotence that makes your stomach clench up hard as a fist knowing there’s nothing you can do to fix it nothing you can say to make them see past their own little worlds a world where a seventy-two-year-old man’s contributions are apparently as invisible as the air we breathe i kept thinking about him later the way he picked at his sandwich with such precision almost like he was afraid to disrupt it and then i thought about my mom sleeping in the next room and the way her memories are just crumbling away like old paper leaving nothing but dust in their place i spend my days trying to shore up those walls that are already too far gone and then i come here and i watch another older person being systematically ignored being made to feel like their entire life’s work just doesn’t matter anymore i just kept thinking is this what it’s going to be like when i’m seventy is this just the price of getting old being rendered silent while the bright young things talk over you about their shiny new discoveries is that why i’m so angry i think it's because i know the answer and it feels like a cold dread settling in my bones a weight i can already feel on my shoulders even though i'm only twenty-four and it feels like i'm already carrying too much weight as it is.