I am lately obsessed with cycles - observing my own, watching others go around and around in theirs.

There does seem to be a greater pattern in everything that we do. It's always easier to see it at the end of the cycle, though. I wonder that there is anything we cannot look back on and fit into a cycle.

So now I am just going to experience and record, and see if there is a pattern later.

My Grandfather and Father came to visit me recently.

My grandfather sits on the thrift store chair like a much younger man, all spread legs and reclining posture. He watches the way that dust moves through the sunlight that filters through the big front windows. I perch awkwardly on the opposite end of the couch from my father and smile a lot, as though this will make up for not being able to think of anything to say. I wish I could just...not be here. But this may be the last time I see him. I think of that every time I visit, or he visits me. He's just moved into an assisted living place, and this brings sudden inspiration.

"How do you like your new house?"

He squints at me. My father tells me later that he cannot see very well, and refuses to go to the optomitrist. He also refuses to the doctor. His skin condition has grown worse since I last saw him. He smooths a hand over his red-splotched scalp and breathes in, then out, before he answers.

"It's nice."

He says it with a finality that scares me. My father says something - I lose track of the conversation, which is mostly about the nice things that are around Delta, and where my Grandfather has been lately - a fish and chip shop.

This, at least, makes him entusiastic. He gets that light in his eyes. It hasn't been there during any of the rest of his conversation. I think when you lose that light, you lose your will to live.

I watch him, the way that he stomach paunches out a little from under his tiny old man chest. He seems to have distorted - morphed from this strong man into a caricature of him. The voice is the same. And he still tells bad jokes constantly and is rampantly racist in a way that only old people find appropriate.

He wears a stained yellow button down - the color of melting butter. His brown polyester pants are pulled high and secured with a black leather belt. These too have scattered stains of various color on them. He's rolled up the bottoms of the pants, exposing white and red splotched hairless legs that wear mismatched socks and teva knockoffs.

This is the closest we will ever be again. It's really the closest we've ever been. There is always that distance between us - this in itself is a cycle - the distance between my grandfather and fater; between my father and myself. it's not that we're uncomfortable around each other - that feeling wears off after an hour of visiting. It's that there is space between what we say and what we want to say. There is space between love and trust.

If there is a cycle I don't want to perpetuate, it is this one. This one that says, whispers "Love, but never trust." I am not sure if I will escape this one. I'm not sure that I've come to a point where this sort of thing is tested. I don't know if I want to look that closely at my own behavior in terms of love and trust. The space where the dust motes float in the sunlight suddenly seems less than empty. I see now, it's full.