There is something traitorous about the people you’re close to getting older. Shifting their shape before your very eyes—gradually, then suddenly. That old Hemingway chestnut applies not just to finances, but to aging as well. Helena Briars, of course, never thought that it would happen to her. She truly believed that she would just watch everyone else around her get older, while she remained forever the same. After all, it had kind of happened for Cher. Granted, Cher obviously had access to the Michelangelo of plastic surgery (whatever his name was). Someone who still managed to sustain the overall look and structural integrity of her original face. Helena would never be rich enough for access to a resource like that.

Even so, it didn’t stop her from paying whatever she could for all the very “best” skin care products, her bathroom cabinet and counter a wealth of creams, serums and other assorted liquids. All designed to “help prevent” the effects of aging. Emphasis on the word help. Or may. Or can. These were highly specific word choices intended to mitigate an actual promise. Which meant any attempt at bringing a lawsuit against these companies that “promised” to keep the ravages of time at bay wouldn’t hold up in court. The language exempted them. Language was always key. Helena ought to know. It was her specialty. Or it had been, back when she had majored in linguistics at UC Berkeley. A lifetime ago now, as her face kept seeming to remind her every time she caught a glimpse of it in some reflective surface (lately, she did her best to avoid actual mirrors whenever possible, but that didn’t mean the windows of various businesses or vehicles couldn’t “get” her).

Since that “era,” Helena had migrated to Southern California, often deemed a treasonous act (for yes, California is its own country) by those who live in the north. To Northern Californians, it wasn’t just that it was such a cliché to move “down there,” it was that it felt like the ultimate form of abandonment, of turning your back “on your own kind.” As though to confirm what the outsiders looking in on California generally believed: that the northern part of the state wasn’t worth shaking a stick at. So sure, Helena felt more than slightly guilty when she migrated slowly down the coastline, starting in Monterey, and then Morro Bay, and then Santa Barbara until finally doing the inevitable when a job called her to Los Angeles. Land of Youth. Land of Making You Feel Impossibly Old Even When You Were Still in Your Twenties. Basically, to be truly considered young in this land, you had to be about eight years old. And God help you if you were a child actor who started that late. For that was at least four additional years of “missed opportunities” on the working front (a.k.a. being pimped out by your parents front).

More ironic/harrowing still, Helena worked for a social media company (one of the newer ones, designed to somehow compete with the likes of “old guard” institutions like Instagram and, now, TikTok). In other words, she was feeding the very form of toxicity that had led her to feel impossibly old as she entered her mid-forties. And though, sure, Madonna (and, again, Cher) had done all she could to exemplify the notion that a woman didn’t need to be “put out to pasture” or “disappear” simply because she had been faced with the “tragedy” of no longer being of “good child-bearing age,” it didn’t change how society fundamentally felt about women “like Helena.” Women who no longer fell into the visibly youthful category, but weren’t quite yet total “hags” either. It was, in essence, a kind of no (wo)man’s land in terms of existence. Almost like being trapped in a form of purgatory where you were neither “make-him-cum-in-his-pants-on-sight” hot, nor “bridge troll” hideous. To be in between those extremes was almost worse than just being pushed fully to “the other side”—bridge troll hideous—and surrendering to the full extent of your invisibility. Or perhaps, at times, it was more like hyper-visibility. Standing out when you “dared” to appear in places you shouldn’t, like concerts…or Bershka.

Helena was having trouble reconciling with this. But she was being forced to more than ever as she did watch those who had once seemed so “ageless” to her begin to look more and more decrepit. This included her older sister, Marigold, who was five years her senior, putting her at fifty. Indeed, she had just turned it last month and, almost instantaneously, appeared to age the ten years that had been evading her all that time until this moment. Helena was terrified that something similar might happen to her. That she, too, would start to become unrecognizable to the people closest to her. To those who had always known her “a certain way.” Who could only see her in their mind’s eye as the person with the same physical characteristics she had upheld for the duration of her twenties, thirties and, hopefully, forties. Even though she was starting to wonder if she was deluding herself about how she looked in terms of the latter decade. That maybe she had willfully convinced herself she looked mostly the same at present. But then, if that were the case, why did she have such a hard time seeing her reflection in any mirror or mirror-like surface?

The answer to the question was too painful, this much she knew. She also knew that, worse than watching Marigold change before her very eyes, was watching her parents change—shapeshift—as well. Who were they now, if not themselves? Were they still even “in there” if they had become so unrecognizable from the people she had known as a young girl? As she drove up the Pacific Coast Highway (she always patently refused to take I-5 to get back Northern California) to find out if she had it in herself to directly make this query, she decided to stop at some of her old stomping grounds along the way, including Santa Barbara, where she took it upon herself to make a pit stop at Joe’s Café, the type of place with red-checked tablecloths, greasy sandwiches, pies and coffee served in plain white mugs. From there, she would venture over to Chase Palm Park and slowly make her way on foot toward Stearns Wharf. She might even spend the night in a hotel if she felt like it. She was in no rush, despite feeling the urgency—the weight and pressure—of time far more palpably of late.

Taking a seat on one of the benches, she rummaged through her purse to remove the book she had been reading of late: Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. She came to a paragraph that read: “Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life’s limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.” Sexist pronouns aside, Becker was on to something.

As she continued to pore over the text, she heard a sound that sent a chill up her spine. A shrill hissing that she didn’t understand until she looked up and saw a California condor looming high above her. It was unusual to see them in this part of Santa Barbara. They usually congregated around Big Pine Mountain, about fifty miles from “main” Santa Barbara. So to see this sight, while reading this book, was particularly unsettling to Helena. Almost as if the universe wanted to doubly remind her she was “getting up there,” and that the reaper was coming, taking his form in this vulture. But then, something happened. An automatic shift, of sorts. Helena decided, in that instant, that she would not fear aging, and the physical changes that came with it. That she would look at it as a transmogrification—“transforming in a surprising or magical manner.” And it was true, that is how it felt to age. Surprising and magical…though no one ever said that those two adjectives necessarily had to have positive connotations. No matter, Helena would make it positive. What choice did she have? What choice did any human have? That is, if they wanted to get through the day without sobbing.

She stared the condor down, as if to say, “Go on, I dare you to fuck with me” for what felt like a full minute before it finally flew away, perhaps back to Big Pine Mountain. Where it might report to the others on its findings; that it had seen a woman who was so affected by its uncanny presence that she decided to accept the aging process for what it was: a rebirth with each new physical incarnation leading toward the inevitable decay. The peak transmogrification: death.