This Is Now

My grandmother is dying. She is on a morphine drip and has been “taken off things.” She goes and I have not seen her in years. Many years. For reasons that I know she does not understand and now never will but never would anyway. I do not know her—what her interior consists of, what she thinks of the world or what her life has been like. She doesn’t know me, but loved me in her way and I loved her back in the way that we love our flesh and blood when it is only flesh, only blood. That and the memories of a kind soft-skinned woman in my very young years before it all went wrong and I lost a sense of where the adults were who could hear a child speak.

And I am getting married. This weekend I am supposed to go with my future wife to Massachusetts to find a place for our wedding and now I feel a split cleaving myself between New York and New England, my past and my future, my suffering and my happiness. This is a life I am living, and these are choices I will make and there is no going back, ever. I see that now.