The nursing home smelled like expired baby powder. Like the sugar in grandma's birthday cake from April 25th getting old. It feels like wet carpets. Like soaked shoes at the bus stop. Like the dried salt from too much crying. The kind of salt that sits in your pores. It has a way of plaguing your body long after you’ve finished sobbing. Seniority handles itself in the same fashion. My grandma’s room is closest to the back entrance. I walk in straight, turn right, punch in some numbers and take a crooked left. I remember thinking the halls seemed like they were modeled after the inside of a broken nose. It didn’t help that residents clustered their wheelchairs against the walls and sat in long silence. I wondered, what were they thinking about ? It’s the sort of question that changes depending on who you ask. Give it to a detached lover and they know you’re worried they’re thinking about all the ways to leave you. Give it to a child and they remind you about a movie they watched a week prior. Pose it to a frail lady parked adjacent to the nurses station and she stares at you like she’s malfunctioning from everything she could say but won’t. Her mouth probably wouldn’t keep up with it all, so better to her for staying vigilant. 1215. It’s four digit, plain, and easy to forget.My first time visiting her felt familiar to me, maybe because the walls in her room resembled the outdated wallpaper she had at home. I used to trace my fingers over the flowers, imagining that they were telling me to, “go back to sleep !” in the morning light.Hushed voices muttering beneath the curl of the petals. I always woke up before her, whether from sheer work of my body or from the way she made her side of the bed sink, I’m not sure. It was funny to see her cot at the nursing home sinking too. She still laid the same, like a blubbery gray seal on its back. Arms stretched behind her head as if trying to relax restless muscles. I sat next to her and she grabbed my wrists while she puckered her lips. Her eyes were tiny, their almond shape exacerbated by sleep. She didn’t look up at me, only stroked my palm with the tips of her fingers, soft after years of baby oil lathers, washing, paying attention to the winter dry. Even her rings couldn’t ever handle the wrinkled glass that made up the back of her hands. They moved and twisted with her skin, gleaming in the light like a babe on the beach wet with tanning lotion. I feel bad thinking about that lustful youth. I know my grandma desired it at one time too- the adoration for blonde hair, shining in movement, just above silky white thighs, tall like cedar trees and skinny like thin pebbles meant for skipping water. Why else would she have insisted on straightening my hair? Hours in front of a blow dryer, the heat on my scalp like a drawn out sunburn, the wicked feeling of westernization in the form of brushes and hot coils knicking the edges of my ear. “Stay still,” She demands. I hear her voice, broken english wrapped in rubber. Surrounded by the pops of bubble wrap from her packages, far few in between. Her slippers sliding across the carpet. I used to hear it late at night often, and thought maybe she was my ghost. Roaming the halls to fend off predators leering over the richly green couch to kiss my face and steal the innocence grandma would laugh at. Sometimes she’d rub my head, her bottom lip sticking out as she praised, “God bless your heart.” I didn’t hear any of that sitting next to her. She only claimed her tired mind, checked the time on her watch and slept loosely next to me. At some point I crawled beside her and we slept under the chime of The Price is Right. I could taste it. The bittersweetness of the moment, I could smell the funeral home’s red carpet and feel the waxy fake flowers standing tall at the corners of the room. I could see myself beneath the TV playing photos of her in slow motion, in pace with the people in attendance. Working our minds for us while we processed everyone's emotions; weeded out who had the right to cry and who didn’t. I do it like clockwork at viewings. I get so angry I pour sweat and it lines my sides like open seams, and I feel like I might bust at the first person to announce their love for Silveana. To tell me how much they adored her after she died, because god knows they didn’t tell her while she was living. Guilt breeded from grief is toxic. I try not to think about that kinda stuff. So I opened my eyes to focus on her hands on my cheeks. They’re cold and refreshing. Even her long, grown out nails-like the word docile as they combed my baby hairs. I used to do the same to her when I was little. They were so wispy and light, like the cuttings from angels' hair, and the edges glowed beneath the window just as good as blonde hair would. The second time I visited she stayed up and in her wheelchair. “Have you talked to your gran-pah?” She rolled her r, and squinted her eyes at me like she would when I was doing something bad. “No grandma. I don’t have his number,” Her voice perked and she pointed at her nightstand,her lips puckered as if kissing her line of sight. “There. It is written down on the paper.” I just shook my head and humored her, “I’ll get it before I leave, grandma. Did they fix your dialysis?” She groaned, pulling the air back into her teeth, “Ahhhh, no. Those people are stupid.”. I let her mind drift aby and watched the clouds in her eyes as they lifted,pulled, and folded upon themselves. She used to have the same color irises as my dad, but they say losing a child is just as good as losing a limb. So I suppose he took that gold wash with him when we buried his ashes next to my moms. Now my grandma was left with greying hues, like demure skies as light rain rolls in, promising no end, only upholding that it will be the sweetest and most delicate rain. The kind kids play in, that makes yellow rain boots fashionably cute, that slides down mellow cheeks as a mourning mother would.Grandma made me notice rain like that. With afternoon naps under a splattered window, the weather crying to come in like a lonesome dog. Now I won’t wake up in the mornings if it’s rainy. Her fatigue has become a bit of my DNA, my blood, or maybe the years of not napping with her simply catches up to me best on those days. They wait patiently on the lick of my brow, waiting to weigh in my eyelashes on pallid days. Yes, it happened just this morning. I woke up, the ceiling flushed with silver paint from the window. The storm lasted all day-even now it stays strong outside my walls. As if demanding I see her, demanding I call and try harder. “The regret will be more mighty than you expect!” It screams. Like a subdued, hiding call of a banshee just watching for her last breath. Collecting the baby hairs that fall and charm the fibers of her cheetah print coat. She was always so cold in 1215. It’s tall and metal like a box, maybe more linoleum than metal, but it’s not as good as the wood floors in Mactan. It doesn’t sound like the door she knocked on in the hall, yelling, “Anak!”, while I rolled my eyes and waited for more rice. She’d open the rice cooker and the steam would flow around her face like it was happy to see her. I miss that rice cooker. It’s faded stains, it’s engravings I didn’t understand. I wish I had taken the time to understand. At the very least I know the smell of piranha in a small kitchen, how the eye bulges out at you in a blank staring contest. I know the puckered lips pointing like hunting dogs, the hugs that flood you in warmth like a hot bath.I know the angled jaw, I know silver baby hairs, waving like flared hems of a dress framing her round face.Mine do the same. Only she bathed me in melanin hopes,and now mine grow in with golden underbellies.I dream of tagalog, spoken in a house made of baby blue porcelain.Sitting fine on a hill with dark puffs, cumulonimbus, thunderheads. Bellowing black whales with powdered icing for tops, wafting in with disastrous quietus. Mahal Kita,I whisper. It carries in the wind, over the curving roads, the bridge, the big sign that says “Welcome to Liza !”. The nursing home street curb, the sliding doors. The plaque with 1215 in black printed letters. The sinking cot, hefty with an immortal soul, crafted of silver and orange sunsets. Mahal Kita. |