I couldn't tell any difference in their ages; they all seemed to be the same age to me. They were simply young, around twenty. Yet whenever I tried to guess, I was wrong.
“Why, can we tell you apart?” said one of them. “How old are you? Fifty?”
I explained to him that among ourselves we differed by only five or six years each. And I wondered how they couldn’t see it. It was crystal clear to those of us of that age.
“Maybe, but not to us,” the kid replied. “To us, you’re just one step away from them,” he said, pointing a little further down to a few elderly people.
“But they're old!” I protested.
“Hey!” an old man scolded me. “Don’t lump us all together. I’m seventy-five, he’s sixty-eight, and the third one is eighty.”
Good God, I thought to myself, I understood nothing. They had all seemed old to me. And on the other side, all young. I could only make out details inside my own range, as if there were a sphere around us defining clarity. Beyond that, things faded out.
“But that’s how all you young people are,” the old man told me.
I understood. I wasn't the clueless one after all, I thought with a certain satisfaction. We simply recognized details within our own sphere.
Spheres all running together along the line of time.
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