Aged Up To This Day

She was really old. Like, insanely incredibly old. The type of old that makes you uncomfortable to be anywhere near it. Forget the smell. All old people smell. This woman, this woman--she was so close to death that you could see it on her. And feel it. Death vibrates.
Every hour on the hour she would reach out one of her hands towards me, usually the left, leaving the right to clutch her bedspread, painfully knobby joints terse and full of emotion. Her hands were sharply veined and transparent. Insect wings. I feigned a sneeze and jerked away every time.
I couldn't stay focused on her words. Over time her voice had worn around the edges like everything else in the room, leaving it jagged and unstable. This instability was impossible for my ears to tolerate. I tried to listen, I really did--I was so terrified of her that I felt that I owed her that courtesy. But I just couldn't. My mind would wander.
Naturally my first thoughts would lean towards my own aging, a topic that had long perplexed me. It creeped upwards without me, leaving me to rely on the calendar to track the years. I never felt aged, even now, far past my midlife crisis. Always just the same me. To this day I'm still not sure if that's a good thing.