I had a hard time yesterday. I was on my way back home from BJJ. It had been a really tough class, so I was tired and therefor a little emotional. I was waiting for a train at Central Station and I got annoyed by someone’s cigarette smoke. There are designated smoking areas on the platforms that I was nowhere near of, so it bothered me quite a bit that someone would be so rude. I looked over and wasn’t surprised to see it was an elderly woman smoking. Usually when people don’t seem to realise how disgusting it is for others it’s an older person who hasn’t quite gotten used to the idea that there’s actually no vitamin C in cigarettes like they used to say there was, let alone get the concept of smoke free areas. And she was old; deep sixties, early seventies perhaps. And by the way she smoked and the way she held her packet of cigarettes, and the wrinkles around her upper lip, you could see that she’d been smoking for a lifetime. And in a moment of weakness, I caught myself thinking, why the fuck did she survive to live to an old age? Why her and not my mother?
