Untitled--23.

23.

I want to tell your story now. I want to scream it, scream it from the rooftops. I didn’t want to tell anybody before. Now I want to scream that you are dying. I had a dream of a rat in a cemetery, leading me to a Medieval place. But in the cinematic version of this, they censored the rat. I don’t know why. Are we unable to look death in the face? Is that why I didn’t want to speak anything about this? I want to force them to understand that you were wife and mother, and you had a hard life, and that you could have been a professional, too. Respect this station.

We tick the time on the clock and we tick it by your bodily fnctions and nurse’s visits. Your blood pressure is still good. I can see that my mother wants to protect me as if I’m a little girl by not having me there when the nurse is there. As if a parent dying is the child’s private shame. We still watch fear-based news and classic movies in the background but now I am relatively convinced that they are for everyone else here, not for you. We review names. You are Doina, but now you are saying names of family whom you haven’t spoken about in years. I am your granddaughter. This is your daughter.

But I will be back here again someday with someone else. That is the part I’d really rather not think about. It’s ok. I don’t know who yet, and I may be completely alone in dealing with this. I have been writing the same story for 23 days now. I am committed to writing it until it ends. I will sacrifice what I need to do create it. But I need to get going now. And you do too. Rest well.