Do You Remember

Christina

**This is another random narrative that I wrote. Enjoy!



Her eyes glistened and lit up as I walked through the door. She looked exactly as I last remembered her all those decades ago. Sure, deep wrinkles now characterized the skin beside her eyes and perhaps her cheeks weren’t as glossy as before, but to me her appearance hardly mattered. It only mattered that I was finally there.

There were no longer any barriers of distance or drama between us, and our relationship, our friendship returned back to its pure, innocent self which we experienced all the way back in grade school. I sat in front of her wondering where all the years had gone and recounting all the days we spent together in the past. All the memories were flooding back to me at once: the time we ran to class thinking that we were late when in reality, we were early or the time we laughed so hard that drool dripped off our chin and snot flew out of our noses.

Suddenly, her voice jolted me from this pensive trance. “What’s your name?” she jokingly asked me.

“Don’t be silly,” I responded. “You have always known me. We’ve been friends forever.”

She sat back and pursed her lips as if she was ready to say something else, but her voice never escaped her mouth. She bit back her words as if she changed her mind. Regardless, our conversation pressed on.

Surprisingly, there was no initial tension or awkwardness that we had to sludge through. My voice obviously dominated the conversation. After all, I had always been the extrovert, the chatterbox, the narcissist, and she had always patiently listened.

Well, today, she listened until she bluntly interjected: “Wait, what did you say your name was?”

I froze. I was confused at first since she clearly wasn’t kidding. As I looked around, I finally noticed the caretaker standing in the corner of the room. Obviously, she was trying to give us space, but I still felt like I was suffocating.

I remember that my heart sank. It actually plummeted. I looked at her, pleading with my eyes for her to recognize me. She didn’t.

“She has early onset Alzheimer’s,” the caretaker gently explained to me. I nodded my head to show her that I understood, but I didn’t really understand. Why her? It wasn’t fair, and why now? She was still pretty young.

When our conversation first started, I had just assumed that she was only joking when she asked for my name. Our friendship had always been one full of easy going sarcasm and jokes, so it didn’t register with me that she was actually serious. She didn’t know who I was.

To her, I was a stranger, and yet still she smiled. Of course, I wished she would remember me. And I wished she would wake up. But above all, I guess I simply wished that every time the corners of her lips would turn upwards once more. To me, she is an eternal beam of sunshine, and while memory fades, at least her smile will linger and shine on forever.



** While Alzheimer's Awareness Month is in November, I ultimately decided that any month of the year would be an appropriate time to shed light on such a prevalent and life-altering disease. Alzheimer's is an irreversible and progressive disease in the brain that steadily causes a patient's memory, and consequently other motor functions, to erode. Currently, there is no definitive cure for this disease. The primary reason that this disease is on my mind is because in many hospices including the one that I volunteer at weekly, many of the patients suffer from this condition, and while human knowledge still isn't advanced enough to conquer this disease, I believe that more public attention to it is an effective way to generate and evoke interest and curiosity among scientists and doctors alike to ultimately find a cure!