desperately_saying_iloveyou this should be rillian i'm in the room where you lay dying and they say you are scared that you have pneumonia. with one lung already removed and the one left riddled with cancer i can see why you are frightened. but, when all my life you are the aunt that scared me, we seem to arrive at a place we both must face our fears. a pinnacle where we stand side by side realizing we must forget what we never had. i was never your nephew. you were never my aunt. you were simply the one who envied my mother because she had two sons who loved her. you could never have children. i try not to look at you swallow air like a goat drinking water. desperately. but i see you. your hair ravaged by the fucking waste of chemo. your teeth liitle bits of stone worn down by anxiety. you are stripped down to nothing but a staunch attitude to live, even if life consists of breathing one breath at a time. one beat of a heart like someone beating a drum, growing tired, longing to quit. they tried to make your hospital room look like your bedroom. fotos of your husband that died of the same disease a year before you. pictures of your two dogs, also dead, who were the closest things to children you could have. i didn't want to see you. yet, when i go, you mouth the words "iloveyou" and suddenly sentiment is all that matters. it somehow erases the past and now when the chalkboard is clean, what do i write? 031127 ... crOwl and now it's bess, laying in the hospital bed, my mother's aunt, who can no longer speak from the stroke she suffered as she watched television and fell face first into the tray table. she laid on her living room floor all night until her neighbour came the next morning. i wonder what she was thinking, her cheek against the carpet? in her hospital bed at st. margaret's, she tries to write but her brain can no longer form words. all she can manage to do is shout for help with her desperate eyes. we look at her, my mom and i, like visitors at a museum, where we have come to see people who have lost what they once were. bess, who was always known for her staunch opinions suddenly at a loss for language. that's a cruel, sick joke. so, my mom takes her face in her hands and kisses both cheeks and tells her, "iloveyou." and i hold her hand like someone who is afraid to touch something that is slowly dying. she reminds me of a fish i saw on marco island. it was still alive and the fisherman had put it in a steel bucket. its eye looked up at me and its mouth opened and shut gasping for breath. holding on to life even though it was slipping out of it with every ticking second. 050221 ... unhinged i couldn't stand to hear the sneer in your_voice that i know must be there now how can i explain my silence? only to have you prove why in every putrid word that escapes your_lips the solitary months we were locked in each other's desparation lonely hearts holding each other up all these months that i have been falling on my face without_you but just a_list_of_you i don't know how i could get you to believe iloveyou my silence concentrating on all your flowering words that placed me up with the clouds how can i explain my silence? now i find myself with the same desperate need that brought us together years_passing_like_seconds but i feel too crazy to let it out on you my silence: i cannot complicate the people i love with my disease i will not so i sit in silence on the inside screaming desperately saying iloveyou hoping to communicate the meaning in my eyes deftly you were one of the only ones to ever understand the meaning in my eyes 050221 what's it to you? who go blather from