As I walked down the dimly lit hallway, the beige pink walls followed my every step. It was as if the light fixtures in the apartment building had not been changed as long as I had been alive on the planet. When I reached her door I hesitated, I had not seen her since my last family Christmas meal, which was eight years ago. It was the last one for a reason. I was so young and naive back then. After two full sets of aggressive knocks she finally opened the door. I still don’t know why she decided to let me interview her for a school project.
Once the door was open a few inches I could smell the stale air she breathed in everyday. Low and behold a cigarette dangled within her reach, dimly lit. She was a different level of boujee and held her cigarette with an old 1920’s cigarette holding stick so her fingernails weren’t damaged. I thought it was ironic she cared about her fingernail health but not her lungs regarding smoking.
Maybe it was the smoking that aged her, or it was her literal age, I’m still not sure. The wrinkles around her eyes never fully disappeared, even when she frowned. I assumed I was about to find out about her full-life, but I could already see the physical wears and tears. Not in a bad way, I always thought women aged beautifully, even if society told them they couldn’t, she found a way to.
The first question I asked her prompted an interesting response, “back in my day, we could not go a day without wearing pantyhose. If a woman wore her pantyhose with the seam twisted or sideways we assumed she was a whore”.
Okay, maybe she wasn’t the ideal candidate for modern day feminism, but she was eighty-seven, what could you really expect? She talked in a way that let you know that she knows what she knows. Even with her spine decompressing, she tried to have perfect posture, her orthopedic shoes perfectly flat on the grey carpet floor. Each additional question dragged on and on, I’m not sure she ever fully answered any of them. By the end of the interview she had filled two ashtrays with ash that her fingertips never touched.
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