Then I wept with my face in your night shirt,

trying hard as hell to say"until death separates us,"

loosening the skin on your breastbone,

I painted your nails and you sleep

while I write all this down.

Grandmother. You were sick.

There was this premature stage that caught you before death; clasped your hand with assurance and played a while before shoving back into your planned grave. This apex when all was a grey, trinkling and tumbling through your insides and mind, a poison in those veins turning from blue to black. A bruise of existence. My most vivid memories are those of china clinking at dinner, and bright hazy lights of warm candels and the chandelier we almost knocked out of the ceiling when jumping on your bed above it. Underneath the warmth of family din there was the silence of what we dont talk about, frozen into our throats like preserved fossils, always the same thing. And when the vomit began was when we three scurried from the dinner table like mice from a threat, cousins like sisters tumbling from the chairs to huddle in the living room. We shut the doors and the shades on the door and pretended we couldnt hear you throwing up. The rasping wails and wretching and horrible splat of semi-congealed food smacking the floor. The croaking yells uttered at the man who married you for fifty some years. And here you had become the mere shadow of the one he promised a life.

Until death separates us.

I was scared to talk to you, because sometimes I couldnt understand what you said. The spittle that pooled in popping and light bubbles around the corners of your faded pink lips, your film of wrinkled chin. The rate of pulsation in your veins was the somber march of illness, the potent kind that runs itself into the ground. Your eyes held no luminoscity, cradled in the raw and tender sockets of your eyes, scooped from skull like perfect, symmetric spoonfuls; a transluncent blue hue, as though you tipped your head back to roiling clouds and filled up your eyes' iris with infinite, indifferent raindrops. When we were about to leave from our weekly visit, I snuck a small peck to your forehead and shut my eyes and held my breath. Usually I was interrupting a fight shut up Shut Up SHUT UP

I thought about those countless days when you must have been in love, you must have been love one day. You must have entwined legs in luxury of cashmere sheets, and the pictures spell the truth; you traveled with bright and fashionable scarves flapping around your neck like the news; I AM ALIVE. You were once pertinent and resilient, until

You were eaten up. The dominant gene, your parting gift to your womb's reguritation; your children's Christmas present long after youd turned a dark enough grey that the doctors decided this is black, this is death, its time to say goodbye. To what though? The thing that made you you had long ago succumb to the irritation, anxiety. The yelling and your soul didnt like what it made you so it slipped away. Out your eears, through the toes of your feet? Through the blood that seeped and accumulated beneath your flimsy sheath of skin, another bruise on the vacuumed skin on your hand? Where does it come from? Is it from The mind that thought and was and lived, with warmth and tenderness towards the three wailing and blood-soaked children you birthed, it found a love that blossomed and spanned years and years. I have proof! The gold locket I wear around my neck everyday, the sunken teeth marks from history. Does it come from that pumping and pulsating heart that stopped beating with youth, and instead began to exhale wearied and bated breaths, having lost their exhultance of vitality .. is that where this poison was made?

Huntingtons Disease. I am petrified, the kind that is paralyzing because where do you go;

where did she go?

You know my build.

You know my size.

The degree to which my eyes are astigmatic.