The Pad

"Your grandfather use to write on walls, he'd just keep writing and sometimes he'd just write on the walls," My grandmother told me recently.

I never knew this. LIke this was news to me. Maybe she just said to make me feel better about myself.

You have a lot of days when you look at yourself, "This is bad." ETc. One of those days, I had--this is good--I was writing on one of those giant desk calenders. Lines and circles and names and odd little facts and things that probably didn't matter. All over the fucking calender. Numbers. Too. Connected and then crossed out and then connected again. And then scrabbled over. One day I looked at it, fresh, and thought, "This is the work of someone who is going insane." Truly.

My grandmother helped me, she made little marks over DHS. Like a little pen. Loops, small with a point over DHS. There is a phenomenon, which is rare, were two people share a delusion. I read about that. We share a fever, caught between us.

Over that even then, she was blank. If I ask her if she was in trouble, she said no. Needed help? No.

She tore off the paper from the calender pad, and gave it to me. One step in the madness. I still have it.