Ouroborous

I helped my Grandma get ready for bed last night, and it reminded me of Time. How her sweater, once warm, goes cold from absence, even though it's fleece, and even though she is here, it ebbs away. I hang the sweater, along with the idea of bereavement leave, on the hanger she has noted for me, before helping her with the socks created to grip the ground.

I could have used these when I was little, instead of sliding like a trackless hot wheel on her linoleum floors. (My knees patterned with the scars of falling of my so-called, "tracks".) With these silicone-soled Big Bird yellow socks, I don't think the vacuum of a black hole could pry her from this earth.

I hope it never does, human thoughts I have as I tuck her into the layers of blanket, just how she taught my mother, making sure the blanket folds under the shoulders just right, just like how her daughter taught me. I seal her to the layers of blankets, securing her because gravity wants everything, especially my friend.

I tell her goodnight as I have always done, a custom created to send tired people to dream or else they toss and turn in silence. She blinks her eyes, so small now without her pair of magnifying glasses. She smiles, and returns the "good night," like she has done so many times before; when we were kids, laying in our nests in the tv room, or after a late phone call, or after the annual Christmas party, when we didn't know that Time kept count of our days.

I look at Grandma, at her hair, as white and curly as the day I had come home from the hospital, always so soft and quaffed. I look at her eyes, as blue as the first time she saw me, her thirteenth grandchild, Kathryn Marian, so clear and deep, like the deep end of her pool. I look at her expression, how she hesitates, unsure of who I am until I shift, and I am Kate again, a feature that has unfolded these past few years.

"I love you, Grandma," I say to her.

She smiles at Kate.

"I love you too," she says.

I think of the cold sweater, I think of how black holes try every day to take her from my world, I think of how gravity wants her to fall. I think of how she takes me and puts her someplace in her mind; a coworker in DC who is always late, a little girl who plays around the house, my mother, her twin, a cousin, a friend, a question. I say "I love you," because I want that one more time to look back on, to have it in my pocket and have that one thing, peace.

She blinks her eyes, and I head to bed, where I have a little monitor to supervise her dreaming. She shifts and speaks to her angels, who ask her to join her after they play a game of cards. She ruffles her hair and shakes her head, and I smile, checking in on her from time to time until she settles in her dreams, the angels now gone, they decided to come back tomorrow, to see if that works best for her schedule, eager to have her in their haloed choir. Her little head is seated in the indents of her pillow, like a waning moon nestled in a crown of clouds. I study her, dreaming, and start to dream myself, the crescent of Grandma's curls the last thing I see.