The Love Of A Wanderer.

The howling of the wind woke me up. The single lamp in the corridor was flickering. Across the hall, from my grandfather's room, I could hear the monotone of the state-employed news anchor blaring from his old radio. I got out of bed and hurried towards the sound, pausing each time the light went out. Relief washed over me as I entered his room, a sense of safety I only ever felt with one man. He sat on his big armchair, sipping the lemon tea he prepared for himself each morning, his ubiquitous radio propped against the stack of books on his nightstand.

"Something's wrong with the lights," I said.

He ushered me over, making space in his lap for me, completely oblivious to the lights flickering in his own bedroom.  

"The news is the same in the dark," he said, offering me a sip out of his cup.

I hated the lemon tea. For years, I tried to like it, a desperate attempt to be like the man who so fascinated me, but nothing warm and sour is palatable to me. As the storm raged outside, we sat together, ensconced by the scent of the pine trees, as he explained the news to me. Ensorcelled, as I was, by the voices that came out of his radio, I cared much more than he see my keen interest in them.

"Their lives must be so interesting, Nana," I said of the journalists that lived in his room.  

"Yours can be too," he said, lifting me up over his head and placing me on his shoulders, "You can tell the stories of the entire world."

I didn't believe him. A young girl, of a certain age, toiling in patriarchal anonymity, learns not to dream too much very early. From him, though, I learnt to live instead of dreaming. My grandfather worked as a professor of psychology in a small mountain town but that's not who he is. To me, his life was magical, he wandered. He left the house, without plan or reason, and returned sometimes days later with bags full of treats and stories. On the occasions that he took me with him, we hitched rides in trucks and depended on the hospitality of strangers to get by the night. We stayed in "haunted" hotels and forests, just for him to prove that the extraordinary and ethereal were a trick of the mind. He taught me how to get lost in the world without worry; run as fast as I could behind every story.

Now his own stories have run away from him.

Perhaps the most cruel conundrum of watching a man of the mind lose his sanity to his mind is that I know he would appreciate the irony.  He would know exactly which old, moth-ridden textbook to retrieve from his coffers to explain his own condition to me. The last time I went home there had been a flood the day before, I got there in the evening and he was sitting in his room, watching the news on a raucous broadcast network. I hugged him, it's hard to see him, it's hard to continually acknowledge that death can visibly hang over a person. He hugged me back, his eyes still focused on the pornography of the events of the day. I sat beside him and watched the news until he fell asleep.

I slept on the couch right outside his room, drifting in and out of slumber as the lightening and thunder threatened to summon the floods once again. Early in the morning, I woke up to the lights flickering in the living room, the darkness doesn’t scare me anymore, it just seems like a part of the day that must come, and will eventually, abate. At a distance I could hear the radio blaring in my grandfather’s room, I got up and walked over. I knocked on the door and let myself in, he was seated on his newer, more expensive armchair, drinking the tea he prepared on the bedside induction stove my mother bought for him.

“Something is wrong with the lights,” he said as he noticed me.

“The news is the same in the dark,” I told him.

He ignored me and gestured that I could sit down on the bed. We sat there listening to the morning broadcast, so different from the news two decades ago.

"Do you know if Ancilla is coming?" He asked me.

Like being ripped out of the womb and torn into shreds, for a moment, I felt completely broken.

"She is coming," I told him.

"She works in the news, you know," he said, his pride visible even underneath the garbled syllables, "She tells many stories, stories of the whole world."

Like being made of light, for a moment, it felt like I was whole.

I tell stories of the whole world. He can forget my face a thousand times so long as that's what he remembers about me; so long as he still sees the part of me that's made up of him. His love is warm and sour, and I have to drink it, as it is.