Noel Negele

The many depressions of life #2

My schizophrenic grandmother 
has lost her passport and her birth certificate.
She married when she was fourteen.
She bore her first child at sixteen,
it was no biggie back then.

Her age now is anybody’s guess.
She’s mid-relic level old
like a miniature of sorts,
made of wax and wrinkles
and as far as eye sight goes 
she barely sees halfway
across her extended hands.

She lives in a house 
barely livable.
She still washes herself with buckets of water,
a woman a century old,
and never leaves the house anymore—
a house with rotten wooded floors and tore up carpets
and leaking roofs—
A slow poisoning of sorts happens in that house.

One night she wakes me 
from a drunken stupor.
She looks petrified 
even in the dark.
“Can you hear them coming up the stairs?”

It’s a dangerous neighborhood.
I am alarmed.
I go outside shirtless—
nothing. The dead of night.
Some cicadas—
the unbearable heat.

In the dark she heard voices.
Wouldn’t let her sleep
so I always left the television set
on in hopes the noise of the T.V
would drown some of the disease 
that kept talking to her from within.

Ludicrous conspiracies
she wholeheartedly believed in:
“They’re fixing me to get married,
I can hear them through the window,
I’m not stupid! For Shame!
In my age? 
Your grandfather’s grave is still warm.”

My grandfather died 
twenty five years ago 
and I’m pretty sure they’ve dug 
him out and burned him.

You only rent that hole in the ground.
It’s a question or whether 
you want to rot first or burn straight away.

We’ve implanted fake 
surveillance cameras 
all over the house. 
All her five children live abroad.
We’ve persuaded her 
that no matter what, 24/7
we were keeping a close eye on everything.

It seemed to help her.

“Look at my phone” I told her once
and she leaned closer to look
and I said
“Can you see? I’ve connected the phone
with the camera in the room and now
You can see the both of us.”
She leaned closer, still. 
She’s so blind she smiles and agrees.
“Yes, yes. I can see us.”

Sometimes I’d catch her knitting 
and stop midway
staring at something at some corner of the room
or another—
staring with disgust on her face 
Something despicable,
something to be dealt with.

It isn’t the disease that 
torments this poor creature
the most,
it’s loneliness.

Most of the time she lives alone
with the voices 
and the inadequate medicine
or inadequate pension 
or those buckets filled with water.

Last time I’ve seen her
she begged me to stay one night longer.
Begged. But I had to go.

She said
“You cry and you cry and you cry
and then you run out of tears
and you just stare at the wall.
What else is there to do?”

Some people will never be happy 
as others will
and if some people can live
way past the age they should—
some live a tragic amount more.