i have becomes a baker, steeped days in the kitchen, filled up with the pride of floating chocolate pudding, the lines of garlic and chilli flakes, the way one small lifted mouthful is everything. this is the way i seem to deal with things. to mix and blend and stir and make sure that everyone is well-fed. here we live in the space of suffering, where days pass endless, remote controlled and distant. where lives are quantified by a movement on the bed. upwards or downwards, and the grinding sound that that makes. nancy's neighbour is a blind woman, who cannot see how her husband is mean to her, who takes each sigh of his unprovoked frustration as an invisible noise, a noise without home or destination. how can she ignore them, when sound is all she has? on monday she was outside, with him and her son and their dogs, them licking her face, the movements of her head with them so close to her.

it smells of melting as we open the door, wander through the open eyes of age. they wear bracelets on their ankles and an alarm sounds when one escapes. this is a place people want to escape from. nancy is suspended, between everything, between herself and all the little pieces of her that scatter the room. she is soft and quiet and her toes rub each other all the time, a constant comfort or battle - i am not sure which. there is nothing we can do to help her, but bake. so that is what we do, every day. pudding and pasta. and that is what it has come down to. that is the end of life. the comfortable space that we can make it, the forward motion of vanishing.