Dating : Distant lights

She was 86 years old but she couldn’t feel it. My grandma always seemed like one of us, one of the kids. Perhaps it was her tiger memory that escalated over the years — she was only getting better at remembering very old things instead of forgetting them. Her name meant “happiness” in Greek but her little soul who was trapped like a wild crow in a golden cage, had always been dark and filthy.

One very hot summer night, I woke up for some water and I saw her sitting on the sofa with the lights on, half naked, looking at me with all of her face skins wrinkled and collapsed around her eyes like a haunting recurring dream had just exploded inside of her.

“Nobody wants an old person. Everyone hates us. But it is not our fault that we grew to be invisible and it is not your fault that you are too young to see. If you look at me closely you will see me. I am still young under all this skin and water”

I sat at the table right across her and she told me her plan was to get to the sea. She hadn’t been allowed to go swimming for the past few years because of mobility issues.

That was the night when I woke up my brother and we took aboard the bike trailer our overweight, depressed, young-at-heart grandma to take her to the beach.

I will never forget her white hands, filled with her golden rings, dancing like sparkling stars on this bright blue sea surface at the summer dawn. And I will never forget looking at her miraculously young face as she walked out of that water.

“Grandma! I can see you! You are so young!”