The door came down slowly at first, then a little faster. The metal hinges keeping the folded wooden ladder together creaked and groaned as she pushed the brown cedar plank back until it stopped, the hollow metal noise reverberating for a few lingering seconds afterwards. Exhaling, Jasmine grabbed the front part of the ladder and carefully brought it forward, unfolding it and straightening it out. She glanced at the faded safety warning stickers below the ladder and the pasted white sheet that told her the door had been installed in the 1980s. She was as surprised as anyone might've been that the wood still looked to be in good condition. All the same, she took a cautious first step onto the ladder, grabbing the provided railing and then another one, testing to see if the rungs would hold. When they did, she continued her climb and made her way up to the room above.
She found herself in a mostly large, open space, only feeling cramped from the sheer amount of assorted things that were mostly pushed to either side of the room. The room was constructed of dark, textured wood that rose into a darker, triangular roof, slanting on both sides and held up by numerous, cobweb-covered support beams. There was a lone, circular framed window on the far wall that shone dim light into the larger room. A few small, scattered raindrops ran down the other side of the glass, the branches of a large tree across the street from their house blowing gently in the calm breeze. Jasmine reached up to a pull another cord hanging down near her arm as she had traversed halfway up the ladder and a single hanging lightbulb clicked on high above her, filling the room with its slightly dulled glow. She made her way to the top of the ladder, then looked around.
The attic was filled with old, mostly forgotten things—relics of a bygone time, memories given physical form. A lot of the things had belonged to her grandmother, a woman who she could unfortunately barely remember, as she had died shortly after Jasmine was born. In one dim corner of the room, next to an old, dusty sewing machine, there were several cardboard boxes filled with a large number of things that looked more and more familiar as she approached them. In one box there was a stack of board games, some of their cardboard tops flattened or damaged to the point where they were simply balancing atop their bottom halves, with toys and stuffed animals filling out the remainder of the space. Loose Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards were strewn about haphazardly on top of the toys, with more buried farther down, bent or crumpled beneath the weight of larger objects. Jasmine lifted the board game boxes halfway out of the box to look at their labels: Monopoly, Candy Land, Chutes and Ladders—these were surrounded by Ninja Turtles and Godzilla figures, tiny hot wheels cars and half-mutilated Barbie dolls. She had played with all of these at one point, before moving onto books and the occasional video game.
The soft, furry stuffed animals were familiar to her too, from when she was about six or seven years old. One fuzzy giraffe head and neck had stuck out obviously from the box, like a flag waving her down from across the room; it was joined in the cramped space by a grey-furred gorilla and a small, black and white panda bear. In another box there was one massive, whole child-sized brown bear missing one eye with dusty fur and a green and red vest, currently dangling precariously over one cardboard flap. Jasmine barely remembered that one from a very early age—knowing it had belonged to her mother first—but seeing it again brought the memory rushing back. Feeling an illogical sort of sympathy for it, Jasmine grabbed it and stood it back up, resting its back against the inner wall of the box.
On the other side of the room, there were several boxes with holidays written on the side in big, sometimes difficult to read lettering. One box had "Halloween" in letters that just barely made it onto that side of the container, like the person who had written it had nearly run out of room. There was also a Christmas box with a tangle of lights and wires hanging out of it and spilling onto the floor. Yet another box was unlabeled but had a large plastic bag filled with tiny, multicolored plastic eggs, some closed, others lying in opened halves.
And then, in the middle of the room, was what appeared to be a large piece of furniture with a massive, dirt-stained cover over it. The uneven, lumpy shape beneath the sheet looked like some kind of apparition, especially in the dark room, but Jasmine knew what it really was. She walked slowly over to the obscured structure, then grabbed one end of the covering. She tugged on the sheet and it barely moved. It was a heavy fabric, something with a thick, wrinkled texture, and it was getting caught up on the aforementioned lumps. She took a deep breath and grabbed another part of it, at an arm's width away, and began to pull. She stubbornly yanked up the dangling ends of the material, getting it up near the top of the structure before pausing for a moment to catch her breath, the thin therapist not in the best physical shape. Then, with a few more arduous, effortful tugs, she dragged the cover down bit by bit, until momentum was finally on her side and the rest fell to the floor in a cascade of dried out fabric, folding in on itself.
Breathing heavily, Jasmine impatiently kicked the heavy, crumpled sheet off to one side, having to resort to multiple fierce shoe-tipped blows, the end of the cover getting stuck on her sneaker at one point and needing to be flung free. Catching her breath slowly, she turned back to inspect what lay beneath. Beneath the dusty cloth was an old dressing table, like one you might find in an actor's dressing room, though this one looked like it was at least from the 60s if not farther back. It consisted of a wide, low dark brown table with several drawers on either side of the space where your legs would go, a small wooden chair behind it, and a large, straight, rectangular mirror that was curved at the top. The mirror had multiple parts to it however, slightly smaller pieces of reflecting glass that were connected but separate, sloping downwards to break away from the mirror and curving around, so that if you sat at the table you could almost completely surround yourself with flexible, folding mirrors. There were parts of the table that jutted out from the main structure diagonally that also looked moveable, to support the weight of the branching mirrors. Jasmine saw her solemn expression staring back at her, with off-shooting secondary reflections of herself lingering at the corners of her vision. Outside, the fog-shrouded clouds emitted the low rumble of distant thunder, the sky darkening as the minutes of the day ticked by.
The table had belonged to her grandmother, she knew, and she had seen it before but not for a long time. Her grandmother had been a dancer, once, a long long time ago, and this had been the very table that she had used to apply her makeup and get dressed before going out on stage. From what her mother had told her, her grandmother had done ballet as part of a local theater group. She had never gained any widespread notoriety, but her mom had seen her shows since the time she was a small child, and she had said that her grandmother was beautiful, graceful and utterly captivating on stage.
Sometime after Jasmine's mother was fully grown, her grandmother had gotten injured after a show one night, something she never recovered from. When her collaborators came to give the old woman the table as a memento of her time there—they had recently purchased a new one—she wanted nothing to do with it. Even after her daughter had wanted to keep it for herself, Jasmine's grandmother seemed reluctant, and had insisted they cover it up. Then, after she had died, her daughter had taken it with her when she moved to the East Coast and decided she wanted to start a family.
Pulling out the small, seemingly hand-carved chair, Jasmine sat. She took a deep breath in, then let it out, looking at her reflection in the mirror. Her hair was long, dark and straight, framing a long, slender face of light brown skin. She could see much smaller, indecipherable reflections caught in the glass of the thin, black rectangular frames that balanced at the end of the long bridge of her small, pointed nose. She was still young, but she was getting older. Jasmine had just recently turned 35, and she could see it, albeit subtly, in her face. The slight, almost imperceptible lines above her cheeks, the way her eyes seemed to retreat back into the shady recesses beneath them as well as the insidious slow creep of her hairline, which was just beginning to recede, if you looked at just the right angle. She also couldn't help noticing her breasts, which rested slightly lower on her chest than they had when she was in her late twenties, even if she knew she was probably the only one who saw it.
From everything she had ever read, from the many conversations she'd had over the years, Jasmine understood the pressure on her to always look beautiful and unblemished, even when it was unreasonable or impossible to do so. She knew that age and aging was an inevitable part of life, something natural that shouldn't be feared or reviled. She knew all that on an intellectual level and yet...there were still times when she missed being twenty. Twenty five. Twenty-eight, even. Times when her skin had seemed to have a shine to it...or even just times when she had a little more energy, when she would wake up revitalized and ready to embrace the day. Beyond that though, she knew there was more to cosmetics than just compensating for insecurity. Her fiancée had shown her on numerous occasions the flexibility of makeup as a medium, even if Melanie usually worked with exclusively darker colors.
