I tell you this:

I tell you this: There's something strange that happens to your very being when you know someone close to you is dying. There is something so inexplicable that compresses all that you know to be true; all that is reason and logic; all that makes the episteme of life; and in that compression is this build-up that cannot hold itself and shoots-out like jets of flame from every fiber of one's being.

I tell you this: My grandmother is dying. The one person that I remember buying me sweets even when the dentist warned of my rotting tooth. The one person that I remember taking me to eat my favourite food even when my teachers said I was over-weight. And there was this time that I sat on grandma's big lap and she took my hand and slapped it hard. She made me cry and said I had done something wrong. And then she lifted me from the cushion of her thighs and went to the kitchen. And that night she made my favourite dishes. It was grandma's way of saying you deserved the punishment, but I still love you - always. And... and when was that time when my father beated me and welts bled from my back and my right eye was bulging in clotted blood? When was that time that I could not stop my eyes from blinking and he took the belt on me in front of grandma? It has been so long, but I remember her waiting for me, waiting for the punishment to be over, and wrapped my trembling body with a hot towel and a wrapped, boiled egg for my right eye. I remember her screams at my father for being so violent and her plump body enveloping my own, daring my father to hit the both of us. I remember... but memories fade.

I tell you this: As I write my nostalgia, I feel my lungs collapsing and my heart stopping. I am crying and burning from the inside as I type these words. I cannot hold them inside me. I don't know how to contain it. And so I write it as I always do. And so I bleed as I always do because I don't know what release is left.

I tell you this: I have never encountered the moments of death. I feel life as I have never knew possible because I know life does not beget life. That is foolishness. I understand it now. The limits of death, the dying affectivities of life, begets life. It is in these moments of bursting, these moments of not-knowing, dying, hoping, collapsing; in these moments of crying, humming, breathing, stopping - that it somehow makes sense to be senseless.

I tell you this: I will lose my grandma. I feel her slipping and I hear her fall. It's so fucking unfair, but death makes us infantilistic - it brings back the conditions of hoping and learning. Always hoping - like a child - to be loved, to be wanted, to be hugged and kissed and sheltered from all pain. Always learning - the brutality that makes this madness spin: the loss of hope, the loss of life, the loss of pain - to acknowledge the numbness that makes all life not worth living.

And finally I tell you this: I will miss her so, so, so, so much. I will always love her, wherever she will be. And I believe now, as I never could, that there is an after-life. For in my heart will always be space that I shall make for those who have made my life worth living. And in this heart that does not beat, that does not hum, that does not make the body breathe, is the heart of every matter and spirit. No one but those whom I have loved and always will love will take the space of this heart, for then and only then, will it always be plentiful. It is paradise in love - always until my death. Like that one day when she sheltered my body from the whip of my father, now I shall shelter her spirit from the senseless body of death.