The Teenager Within Meets the Body Time Built

I am thirty-nine years old and still surprised when I need reading glasses.

Inside this body that requires more sleep, makes strange noises when standing up, and finds new aches in previously reliable joints, lives a seventeen-year-old who believes he’s invincible. He remembers when staying up all night meant feeling energized, when climbing stairs didn’t require conscious effort, when “getting older” was something that happened to other people.

This teenager inhabits every cell of my aging flesh, confused by the betrayal of time, wondering when his container became so unreliable.

The disconnect is jarring—my mind moves at the same speed it always has, processes information with familiar patterns, generates ideas and dreams with adolescent intensity. But my body has become a foreign country, operating under new rules I never agreed to follow.

I catch glimpses of this internal teenager in moments of pure joy: when Arash tells a joke that makes me laugh until my sides hurt, when Happy surprises me with something thoughtful, when I hear a song that transports me instantly to 1998. In those flashes, I’m seventeen again—weightless, possible, infinite.

But then I stand up too quickly and feel dizzy. Then I need to rest after playing cricket for twenty minutes. Then I look in the mirror and see my father’s eyes looking back at me from a face that used to be exclusively mine.

The cruelest part is how gradually it happens. Each day brings such microscopic changes that you don’t notice until someone shows you a photograph from five years ago, and you realize you’ve been slowly becoming a stranger to yourself.

Happy sees this confusion in me. “You look surprised,” she said after I stretched my back and winced. She’s right. I’m constantly surprised by my own physicality, as if I’m living in a rental body that someone forgot to maintain.

But maybe this is the gift of internal youth—it keeps us curious, keeps us believing in possibility even when our knees suggest otherwise. The teenager inside refuses to accept limitations, keeps proposing adventures that require negotiations with reality.

Perhaps the tragedy isn’t that we feel young inside aging bodies. Perhaps it’s that some people feel old inside young bodies, resigned before they’ve even begun to decline.

What if the teenager inside is not confusion but grace—proof that the essential self remains untouched by time’s crude editing?