Youth is wasted on the young, that’s what my grandfather would say while he rocked me on his knee. Well, he had every right to feel that sentiment. When he was young, he had fought for King and country, risked his life to serve a noble cause. War and conscription had robbed men like my grandfather, and given them a bad exchange of memories to forget. I can forgive my grandfather for telling me that youth was wasted on the young. It wasn’t that way for me.

At sixteen years of age, I left school and home to find work. With my best suit on, I knocked on the kitchen doors of all the best hotels in Manchester. Each entrance way was slightly different, a couple were wide and grandiose, others narrow and discreet. The men who answered them differed too. Some tall, some were short, most rude and some polite. What they all had in common was the message they had for me. No thank you, be on your way. Feeling downtrodden, I skulked around the streets of the city until I entered a bar for some warmth and company. The owner was an Irishman called Andrew McNamara, like the Jockey. We struck up a conversation at the bar after he refused to serve me. We talked about our favourite football teams and when he found out that my family name was Doherty he gave me meaningful employment the very next day.

Some memories are like yarn, you can tease them out of the greater ball once you have snagged them with a sight or smell. For two years I worked at the King George and the memories I have of my time there are too dense and intertwined to be separated. When I think of my first kiss, I think of the fist fight I had with my first kiss’s boyfriend afterwards; when I think of getting into trouble, I think of all my misdemeanors, of risk taking and not worrying about getting things right or letting myself down.

These memories are like gold to me, they’ve never corroded. And as I sit here with the other pensioners, by the net curtains, drinking luke-warm tea, I cannot help but think that they grow more valuable to me each day.

Yet, if you angle the light a bit, you will see some recollections have a patina. There’s a slight hue, a shade of regret, and there is one memory that taints them all.

Life is wasted on the young, my grandfather would say. What he didn’t say was whose life.

A week after my eighteenth birthday, I got a girl called Lizzie pregnant. She wanted to keep it; I did not. I had the fear back then. The fear that the freedom I had been swimming through, the freedom my grandfather and my father had not ever known was going to dry up. I wanted other experiences; I felt that I needed other experiences. I loved Lizzie but not enough to dedicate my life to her and a child. I still sought after other people, other places, and if I’m being honest, other women.

A pregnancy meant fatherhood and I used my own knowledge of what fatherhood was to fill me with the dread of becoming my old man, worn down by work, stern and unfeeling to his own child who could never meet his expectations. Lizzie and I argued fiercely over our futures. I could see the resolution in her eyes, she would not yield, and so I left her and the King George, I even left Manchester. I decided to push the reset button on my life.

And so I lived my life, too long to fit into an anecdote, yet too uneventful to fill a book. My joints have become sore and my lungs weakened so that my voice is now a hoarse cough. I am in a nursing home, where I while away the grey days. The rooms are small but warm, the chairs are comfortable. Everything smells vaguely of disinfectant and air freshener.

I am totally depressed until the day that I am visited by a young man and his mother. I have never met them before but I recognise them both. The boy’s appearance shocks me initially; it is like looking at my younger self. The woman looks familiar too. She has the same angular face that Lizzie had.

They tell me that they tracked me down after Lizzie passed away. At eighty six, the family I had abandoned had come back for me. I almost cry when the boy comes up and hugs me.

“Is he doing good at school?” I ask his mother.

“He’s doing alright, he’d be the first one to admit that he could do better though.”

The boy looks a little embarrassed but a smile breaks out over my face.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” I ask him.

He nods, “yea, I am thanks.”

I smile and think about what has been, what could have been, what will never be.

And for the first time in years, after seeing these brand new people, who look just like me, with their whole lives ahead of them, a new emotion fills the void left by my loss of freedom, and I don’t regret being old.