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I drive the young ones.
That's the job now.
I pick them up at the Bayshore clinic and take them home. They walk in old. They walk out… younger.
Not their face. Their insides.
My van seats six. And most days it's full.
Last Tuesday I drove a man named Harold. Eighty-one. He'd just had his third eye reset. Second Sight, they call it. A shot that wakes the cells up and rolls the clock back.
But he cried the whole ride home. Not sad. And he could read the road signs again.
I'm happy for Harold. I am.
But I think about my mother on those drives.
She lost her sight to glaucoma back in 2029. Slow, then all at once. The doctors said the nerve was dead. Nothing to do. She died in the dark.
Sixteen years later, Harold buys his eyes back for forty grand a year.
That's the part nobody warns you about.
The science came.
It just came with a price tag.
I got my own clock read once. Free, through work. You spit in a tube. Two weeks later a number comes back.
Mine said 61. I'm 54.
Seven years older than my birthday.
The nurse just shrugged. Said stress does that. And said poor folks age faster. I already knew.
Here's the thing about this new world.
It didn't skip us. It just charges us more to catch up.
My daughter, though. Nella.
She's 26 and diabetic. Last spring she grabbed a cheap spit test off the pharmacy shelf. Nine dollars.
It flagged her kidneys aging fast. Caught it early. Her doctor swapped one pill and the number came down.
Nine dollars.
That same test cost five hundred when I was her age.
So maybe it trickles down.
Slow. Then all at once… like my mother's eyes, but the other way.
I still drive the young ones home. And I still watch them blink at the sunlight like babies.
And I still wonder what my mother would've seen.
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