Votive Voces for the Dead

I paid Google twelve dollars, almost everything I earned aggregating (huzzah, to echo a Harvard instructor), for a domain to protect all my writhing processes, and now I want to hit delete. Poof. Boom. Exhausted tinder, wipe it out and start over, rescind my swearing on a certain Shakespearean head, slay my malevolence and aim for love me I'm an invalid endearments, but it would not work. I'd find my way back to the wrong side of the culture wars, and even my relatives in Rome, of whom I have only faint hints, would be tempted to gag me and rummage for a hair shirt and a switch. We rarely see in film that the dying too can be tyrannical, the longer they linger, and Marie the Italian aunt is furious with me, over trifles, but she wins, I scurry, whose lungs the worse for wear? (Mine)

She needs hospice, while I, more ruthless, prepare my funeral train. I may have read former follower Clark wrong; twitter disconcerts us all, and the inferences I sewed together may be off base. It is difficult to engage each other through devices with so many loopholes and IP addresses, but after I wished her farewell, I began my rather fated outreach, and Marie's farewell to me, in so many words, is an old, precious photograph of Lillian walking me, in little white braces, with my cousin Thomas, who, much like my father's son, overdosed himself to death. I never knew what Lillian suffered through all this: diseased husband, divorced sons with menacing tempers, half bred daughters in law, one of them a loon. My mother.

What the fuck am I? The scathing, if manufactured, sociopath? I was a horrible child, my other aunt's assurances aside. Mother hate, and rebellion against the matriarchs, and yet Lillian, who ruled like the queen mother in her family, is the voice of my dead, the voice of a small Mediterranean country that created the world as we know it, and collapsed into a tourist location for mystery writers. My grandmother is here, with her taciturn disapproval reigning me in, with her stern peasant strength and pride that made her beautiful.  Voglio vedere la sua Roma, mentre lei lo sapeva, ed esprimere un desiderio. I'll check it against my dictionary later, in my bad habit of having nothing to say. But I'm a writer. I boil the water, out comes the angel hair, al dente, or softer still. I am not sore at Marie. She's dying, and scared, not that my mortality isn't looming with terror, but I may have slightly more time, whether Jerry forgives me or not. He was the most extraordinary instructor I ever knew, bar none, and coming from a teething bitch, fighting to the last breath, that is the best gift I can ever return, even if he was Irish. Italians look down their noses, you know.