Throughout my life I have been accused of being, more or less in chronological order: precocious, mature for my age, killjoy, stale, grandma. It’s a quality I’ve always had, ever since I tried to teach myself Latin at school while refusing drugs because “it’s not going to give me more nerves than I already have.” I was the girl who didn’t go to water parks for fear of catching cystitis and who didn’t dress up as a prostitute on Halloween in case she caught cold in her stomach. And I am comfortable with this reality. I enjoy canceling a dinner with friends because I have to connect to a course online about gothic literature that is only attended by octogenarian ladies who forget to put the mute as they shuffle loudly for refreshments. I like to complain about how late it starts MasterChef each week, answer out loud to Anne Igartiburu in the heart as if he could hear me, being afraid of ingesting Ibuprofen for the kidney and stealthily lowering the volume of the television because the neighbors.
View more
I’ve been waiting for decades for the people around me to reach my mental age, but my smug smile fades as the years go by and my 45-year-old husband keeps suggesting we go to Toni2 at 12:30 at night. I want to be the woman who waits in the living room in her robe and curlers to scold her when she comes back at three in the morning, but she can’t stay awake that long. I don’t understand why people stay to eat and return home at dawn. I never understood the “meet for a coffee and hook up”. Either you have a coffee or I have the plan stipulated in advance because I have to know whether to take a cardigan or wear comfortable shoes and how many hours I am going to be outside in case it is expected to rain during any of them and then we start another batch of preparations.
I don’t really understand what the trap is or the reason for the false nails that girls wear nowadays that will always remind me of those who Gary Oldman in dracula. I wait with rage for some young person to help me put my suitcase on the AVE luggage rack, but there is no young person in the preferred car, we are all older gentlemen who choose to spend their money in silence. I like to say “it is not necessary” in a non-ironic way (I am an arrogant old lady, specifically). Monitor time as if it were going to reveal the true meaning of life. Watch movies with subtitles because the actors nowadays do not vocalize, they only emit low growls that we must decipher with patience and expertise of Jane Goodall squatting in the jungle.
i’m the same as Tom Cruise if instead of jumping on a motorcycle from a helicopter he approached the herbalist in a knitted coat. I’m an older lady on the inside, and I like it. I’ve been waiting too long for you to be too, but I don’t know what happens that you don’t shoot. Don’t you want to have dinner earlier, sleep more hours and learn about the different types of trees? Let’s see if you hurry. I’ll be waiting for you.
This article originally appeared in Vanity Fair Issue 174.