Despite knowing the workings of life, the gradual process of watching loved ones (who are Older than me) grow older is a helpless, heart-wringing feeling. To see the hands that caressed me (when I was a child) now all wrinkled, or once-chubby countenance now overtaken by the bones behind it feels so hard for the mind to accept. 

In a dark yet prevailing part of my head, my Parent is still a parent doing parent things. It takes a more-deliberate mind to grasp that they're doing grandparent things, and that they're not as fast in mind or body as their mental GIF in my mind.

And as I type this in the silence of the night, heavier and more resounding are the noises of those tiny hands trapped in the apparatus that tells the time.