Grandma

My heart is always broken.

As it begins to mend, little by little, the pieces binding together like magnets or a flock of birds, I get scared. I run the other direction, back toward the fence in the alley where the big black dogs and the pushers and the street piss and confusion live anonymously. I sit next to a dark and empty bench, where I know I will discover the contingency of sadness and toxcicity and I wait for them to take me back to where I know.

The birds disappear one by one, the magnets falling off and I sit alone as the light passes me by. Just a block away children play dodgeball in the street within a blazing New York York heatwave. Teenagers fall in love under the sunset of the Santa Monica Pier. Students graduate from college in a New England brick ampitheater. Paintings are stroked based on a mango-colored canyon. Passion is born.

Celebration thrives and I am numb. I wait for the blackness because that's all I deserve.

One bird keeps flying over my dark street. Not high, but she is flying and she is named Eula. Eula is now sitting on a trashcan painted with grafitti. She cocks her head to the side and she cannot see my pain. She doesn't feel my insecurity. She just sees her beautiful grandson.

We sat on her bench in Chico just 10 years ago playing Uno as we had since I was 5. I won every time. It was late at night and she made me silver dollar-shaped pancakes with the crispy sugary edges I loved.

She told me stories of singing with Danny Thomas in the 40's as a background vocalist on his radio show and about how she kicked a manager in the balls after he tried to seduce her while she was pregnant with my dad, ending her career on the radio.

She'd say how handsome I was, how there was something really special about me. She just knew it.

She'd remind me that communication would always lead me home. How talking it out would always make me feel better. How when people love you they sometimes do things you hate. How the greatest thing you can do is care for another person. How saying a prayer always makes you feel better. How crying gets the sad out of you. And how it was ok "not to care about snatch."

She had no education. She couldn't drive, and the highlight of her week was long john silvers on friday after getting her hair done.

Still, her eyes were made of God. And she always knew when she couldn't top the last piece of wisdom. That's when she'd go to bed and check on me an hour later as I lay under the window of her house in the mountains next to a birdfeeder, 10 of them, that we'd need to refill in the morning.

As I sit here in my darkness, hurting so much and wanting to love myself the way I know I should--I give my heart and soul to that beautiful wide-eyed bird next to me, and pray that tonight she tucks me in safely.