Last night, in my dreams, I was dying.
It wasn't particularly painful or sad or anything, just a bit of a hassle.Various family members featured vaguely in my dream, coming to offer condolences or talk sense into me. But the main character, making a very surprising appearance, was my grandmother. The more distant one of my grandmothers, the one who died a long time ago and whom I didn't see that often even before then. In my memories she is always sitting on her bed, quiet and gentle of mind, body twisted by arthritis, crocheting doilies until the pain in her joints stopped her. Still, she must have been a strong woman once, the daughter of a farmer and marrying a penniless farmhand even though her father threatened to disinherit her.
My teetotaller granny, who was probably never within a mile of a wine bottle in her life, managed to shock me deeply last night. In my dream she was convinced that she knew a way to save me from death. Somewhere, she had gotten her hands on an Arabic wine bottle and if she could just figure out the writing on the label, these words would stop death.
In my mind, as of now, she is Scheherazade.
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