The Seventies-Personal Narrative

The dog yapped wildly as its owner slowly spoke. Her voice was fairly unique, in that it was both squeaky and deep, like a distorted teenager going through puberty. The dog, however, was the usual garden variety mutt you can find digging through trash all over the country. His fur was mostly white, with brown streaks of indeterminate origin. I sat on an old couch that had most likely been passed down generation to generation, with each tear and rip being covered up with duct tape. The couch was less of a couch and more of a duct-tape based art piece at this point. The room itself was straight out of some post-apocalyptic version of the Seventies. A shag carpet, which at one point was probably one color, was what I was nervously resting my
My mother was with me and introduced me to the woman, and then she left, stating some difficulty with my grandmother. And so I sat across from the wrinkled, alien figure right now. Her eyes were cloudy, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was blind. She was ruminating on her own sons and daughters, who I’m probably supposed to recognize. She began spouting a long, almost seemingly prepared diatribe about how they had all grown up and moved away, becoming lawyers, doctors, musicians. She may have been the most lonely figure I have ever seen. “An’ Sandy’s had two children, you can see ‘em on the wall there. I’ve never really had the chance to meet ‘em, but they seem lovely. I’m sorry for the mess, after Bill passed, I haven’t really cleaned up too much. Why would I? Ha. They say, they say that family is everything, that that’s what keeps you going. I think that’s nonsense. People drift away. They die, grow old, or just plain decide to not talk to you anymore. If you rely on family, you’ll end up like me.” Her cloudy eyes began to rain. “You’re young. You can still decide how you wanna live your life. Me, I’m done. I’ve seen the end, and it’s comin’ fast. And I’m terrified! You see these old people talk about how they’ve come to accept death or whatever. No, I’m not one of them. Every single second of every single day, every single piece of me is screaming that this isn’t true. That it’s not going to end this