When care takes form of repetition; replicated motions, oft- repeated 1s and 0s. During his pneumonia’s last stages, it had turned his own lungs against him. It was as though they wanted to breathe for someone else. The frequency of his requests would soon become the bane of our existences. My insomniac practices would flourish under the guise of nursing for him. I had to remove and reattach that little oxygen tube intermittently throughout the night. But somewhere in the centre of the night, in the core of my insomnia, coupled with the backdrop of his piercing groans, I forgot to differentiate strings from wires. The act of putting the tube into his nose and securing it by his ears would become a matter of complex topology. The nasal cannula would take on a bohemian geometry, with strange elasticity, truncated lengths and heightened shape memory. It bore a serpentine resistance. It is comparable to the fluidity or architecture that occurs during dreams. Yet, grandfather would clasp onto my hands and say that his heart longed for the silence that emerged from the lack of a heartbeat. I had a lot to say, but silence was almost always most comfortable to me.
