To be.

Ambedo

Ambedo

By Sofia Khiskiadze

My grandfather is a poet.

Not by occupation but through experience. He writes everyone in my family lyrical poems for their birthday, kind of like his way to contribute and relate to the young.

I had never heard any of his personal poetry. But this Friday night was different. He silenced everyone and began to read.

The first few lines were about his first love before my grandmother. I looked toward her to see her reaction, she was just shaking her head.

It only took his audience a few minutes to start chitchatting among themselves, only paying attention when they heard him read their name. I wanted to yell at them to quiet down and give him some respect, but I wasn’t old enough. So I continued to listen and he continued to read.

He wrote about the time he couldn’t eat for eighteen days because he had meningitis and about his participation in the war. His hands were shaking a bit every time he turned the page of his marbled notebook. As he reached his last lines, he was editing his words as he read them saying “Well, I haven’t finished it yet.”

I can’t say I understood every adjective or his style because he wrote the poem in Georgian. But I could understand the plot and the significance of the simple words he used and the way that he read and the way that it rhymed- I appreciated its beauty and effort.

A couple months later, he ended up in the hospital.

I went to visit him on a Friday night. “Why did you guys bring her here?” he whispered to my father, but I heard it anyway. It was his way of saying “I don’t want her to see me this way.” He had a big oxygen mask on with black straps tying it to his head. Every few minutes he would take it off and say how uncomfortable it was, he would make my dad adjust the height of the bed every thirty minutes and tell him how he hadn’t had a good nights sleep in such a long time.

My dad turned to me and said that apparently for the four days before he came to the hospital my grandfather wouldn’t let himself sleep because he thought he was going to die. My tears fought a hard battle when I heard that.

“The guy next to me has his TV on. Have them turn my TV on to the Russian channel.” My grandfather demanded. “No pop. You need to get some sleep, and TV will distract you.” They bickered until my grandpa gave in and my dad turned his iPad on in front of him as a peace offering. He said the thing to watch in hospitals was the animal channel. So for about forty minutes my father and I watched the anaconda eating a hippo and the lion defeating a zebra, as my grandfather went to sleep. I wandered about the people who waited around for animals to kill each other so that they could film it.

“Oof” he said as he awoke. He complained about his catheter and about how hot it was in his room. He was a man in pain, but it didn’t stop him from trying to fix his hair through the straps of his mask. The nurse came in to take his blood, and she said a couple words in Russian so that he could understand and asked him how to say a few words too. As soon as she left, my grandfather laughed about how she was trying to impress him.

The guy that was next to my grandfather, separated by the thin white curtain was old, and withered. He kept groaning from pain, and every time the nurses tucked his bandaged feet under the covers, he would untuck them again. As my father and grandfather surpassed the curtain to go to the bathroom, I heard the movement of the UV from the other side, moving back and forth thinking ‘No, it can’t be.’

Apparently it could be. When my mother and aunt came to the hospital, my father told them about how the man through the curtain was masturbating. It was disturbing but my father pointed out how we couldn’t judge a man who was suffering. I didn’t.

The intricacy of old age is beyond anything I can comprehend. Granted, my grandfather is young by age but his soul seems old. He has gone through so much hardship as a young man, some of which he mentions in his poem. Some of them left out.

In Georgia, my grandfather was a man of great wealth. The kind of wealth that got his son kidnapped for ransom money. The kind of wealth that got his son tossed blindfolded in the middle of an intersection. The kind of wealth that took away his youth and left him homeless. But the gentle God had taken mercy on him and saved his son.

This was a hardship experienced by everyone in my family, as they all left Georgia and scattered around for a couple of years. They constantly talk about how I was the one that helped them through the hard times- I was about six months when this all happened. I guess my inability to comprehend the situation and to be a source of constant entertainment gave them light in a dark place.

Eventually, everyone in my family found some stable ground beneath their tired feet. And now here we are living as an average family in the land of the free bickering about whether to turn my grandfathers TV on.

Ambedo

n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details—raindrops skittering down a window, tall trees leaning in the wind, clouds of cream swirling in your coffee—which leads to a dawning awareness of the haunting fragility of life.

Cover Letter for Draft 2

For this draft, I focused on section breaks. I have two breaks in this draft, which creates three sections. The first is my grandfather as a poet, the second is my grandfather in the hospital, and the third one is my reflection on his life in a way. I knew I wanted to write about this because for some reason his reading his personal poetry was so touching. And the fact that no one would listen made me really upset in that moment. But then I wanted to somehow connect it to what happened later when he got into the hospital, which was so lucky because had he gone a day later, it might have been too late. And I guess the third part was my way of making both of those events matter and connected, so that the reader has some sense of the hardship that he went through from being rich to poor, from getting his son kidnapped. I guess it was my way of explaining why he aged so quickly. In a way, I thought all three parts were important, and the way to include them both was through section breaks. Whether I did it successfully I am not sure. Also, I am not sure about the title, because it seems to not be a real word- at least not one defined in the dictionary, so would it be okay to use it, if I provide a definition?

There are two sentences that I like the most in this draft. “It was disturbing, but my father pointed out how we couldn’t judge a man who was suffering. I didn’t.”

What bothers me are the transitions and the commas that I need to work on, as well as my run-on sentences. I tried to fix it as I went along, but I feel like because I have been writing in this manner for such a long time, it will take time to fix and I will certainly pay more attention to it in my revision.

Questions:

1. As a reader, what is the thing that sticks out the most to you in this draft? (could be stylistic, or in terms of content/ could be good or bad)

2. What do you think the point of this draft is? (ie: the main idea)

3. If you were to give me one piece of advice, what would it be?

                                                                                       Silence.

By Sofia Khiskiadze

I found myself in a dark living room somewhere in the emptiness of New Jersey, with people I did not yet know yelling “Midnight treat! Midnight treat!” When it turned twelve, everyone fell silent waiting for something to begin.

It was about thirty of us fidgeting on the chilly floor when B turned on a recording of a guy whose name I can’t remember, but I had heard similar stories to his before. He talked about defeat and triumph, one of those sports stories that differ from athlete to athlete ever so slightly.

B went first. Her voice, as I remember it, was quiet and gloomy but in control. She sounded strange, a voice I had never heard before, as she unfolded her story in front of a room full of strangers. She told us about her alcoholic mother, and her drug addicted father. How she had to practically raise her brother on her own. Her voice, her story, the cold floor –it was all so uncomfortable and unfamiliar, I felt an army of goose bumps take form.  The girl next to me started crying, and I could hear the sniffles from those on the other side of the room. After she had finished telling her story, everyone stayed silent, not offering her a touch on the shoulder, or a hug, but just the silence of a listening ear; we stayed that way for what seemed like hours.

These stories were endless within the infinities of silence and voice, the cold breeze, and my bladder constantly asking for attention, that I could not give. K told her story somewhere between B‘s and mine. She was tall with blonde hair, and a smile always on her face. She lived in Detroit with an alcoholic father and a mother who could not handle his absence. Her mother had tried to commit suicide, and was hospitalized afterward. “I had to go to therapy sessions after that” K continued. “A couple days a week, that’s where I would be. One day, I was talking to my mother on the phone, and she asked me what I had talked about with my therapist. I told her ‘It’s none of your fucking business’ and hung up. That day, she hung herself.” I could hear the guilt in her voice as it began to slightly break, replaced with the loud sobbing of those around us.

Several stories came after hers; mine included that sounded childish in comparison. I talked about how I had been moving from place to place every couple of years after I was born, from Georgia to Russia to Poland, back to Russia and finally to America. I told them about how we all used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with eight people, and how my dad was in Russia for the first three years after we came down here. I told them about how I felt suffocated by my family sometimes, and how I always felt alone in a room full of people. My thoughts weren’t organized and I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell them so much, or so little.  I am not one of those overly sharing kind of people. But that day, in that dark room when no one looked at my face while I talked, but just listened to my voice, I wanted to feel like a part of the whole. Of course, like all the other stories that had followed, mine was treated with the same silence except it wasn’t comforting. I felt like there were people waiting for the right moment to break it, so that they could finally get their chance to talk. And eventually it did, with a story I cannot recall.

–

Later that night, B fell off the roof. She had taken what was rumored to be molly. Everyone panicked, as we raced to the tiny cramped up room between the kitchen and the living room. Her face that night, I may never forget; it was the palest of white, as she violently shook. K, being the medical student of the group, took the reigns on the situation. She made a bed-like structure from the chairs, and patiently questioned B. I wasn’t around to hear the questions or the answers; we were asked to leave the room. But I did hear an elevated voice demand to be left alone so she could get some sleep, but K didn’t let her, murmuring something about a concussion.

As it started getting late, the people who still lingered awake thinned down to a few. We rid the kitchen of the beer cans in case we had to call an ambulance. I remember A walking around in shorts and high socks, saying something like “ Confucius say, he who stands on toilet seat is high on pot.” She tried to lighten the mood, as we nervously laughed at the joke. Afterwards, we went out onto the porch and smoked a few cigarettes to calm the anxiety. The fresh cool air of the night fading into light felt good and yet still unsettling.

The morning uncovered B’s body untouched by the antics of the night- she was fine. But to this day, none of us know if her fall was an accident, or a calculated measure. I still cannot forget the image of B trembling with the face of a ghost, while K kneeled in front of her with a helping hand- one ongoing story intertwining with another.