episode tender_square my grandmother was seventeen when she experienced her first manic episode. my mother always suspected that hormones were the cause; grandma was a late bloomer who didn't start menstruating until that age. an enormous amount of stress was also put upon her at the same time: her parents forced her to come back from a nannying job she loved in rome, to chaperone her youngest brother, sammy, as he immigrated to canada, a place she never wanted to move to. my grandmother was seeing a boy then as well and, though nothing scandalous happened between them, her parents were scandalized. there's a black and white photograph by her bedside in the nursing_home, showing her, a cousin, her father, a woman in an elegant hat and a young well-dressed man she can't name. palm trees slouch towards sky. grandma's been studying her ten-year-old expression, remembering pieces long forgotten. the woman may have been her father's mistress. she spoke of riding a donkey with supplies as a job to another village, that her father went along with her, two young teenage women by his side, "cece and nono," grandma called them. at one point, the three of them disappeared and left her. "i always knew when something was going on," she said, even if she didn't have the words to name what was happening. mom asked if they were prostitutes. i wondered if they were nicknames my sick fuck of a great-grandfather used to describe the one who would do what he wanted and the other who would fight him. for decades, grandma's insisted her father never touched her. but he touched her sisters, and touched her nieces, and he touched my sisters. when grandma had her first manic episode at seventeen, she didn't speak for six months. maybe she didn't have words for an unspeakable act committed against her. 230306 ... past a pause and step towards a fall and twirling between this and it all but the worry if heard (oh what's the damn word?) a pause a pause a pause a pause 240228 what's it to you? who go blather from