Untitled--6.

6. 

I wanted to not have to talk about this. It sounds different when you put it that way. I wanted this to be kept a secret, for it to be our own private, personal ritual. Only we would know after the sands washed away, we would only have story. But you were wife and mother, and too few people tell that story, so there was another reason to speak it. We mark the time now with the ticking of your kidneys. I wonder what time feels like to you, whether those anchor points throughout your day, food and bathroom, shorten it or stretch it. There is something more sacred about these rituals not being talked about.

You watch old Jimmy Stewart movies and fear-based news. In my head or sometimes even to my friends I joke that the news keeps you alive. Keeps the heart pumping if there is some kind of conflict, if there is the ever-present illusion that we will lack peace. Maybe we will keep running after it. Daylight Savings time promises to change everything.

We review the anchor points, the names. You are you. I am me, I am your granddaughter. Not your daughter. This is your daughter. Your other daughter lives far away in Romania now. She might as well not exist. Short-term memory is a strange thing. We talk about life using our relationships to one another. Ticu had a schedule. Three months. Let’s conform to it.

Someday I will be back here with someone else. I will have to go through the same review myself. I have no siblings, so I will have to take care of those relatives on my own. I don’t know how I am going to get to that point. I hope our society changes by then. But it’s getting late, and you’ll have to go pretty soon. I have been in death and darkness. I still don’t understand what you are going through. But it’s getting late. Get some sleep.