I drag my hand through a pool of collected memory. Drops of forgotten moments, of long-lost friends, of dark nights catch on the tips of my fingers, then fall away before I can snatch them up again.
I stare into the mirror over my bathroom sink. The color in me has faded; all greys and blues, instead of the vibrant pinks and yellows I remember. My skin is creased and folded. In the lines I can read sixty years of history: bills to pay, children to raise, jobs to find, a spouse to bury…
I grip the edges of the sink. The strength in my hands ebbs quickly and I feel myself wobbling.
Even my voice is gone, and when I speak, it cracks and wavers. The voice in my head still echoes youthful and strong.
They tell me Alzheimer’s is killing my mind- that’s it’s slowly dragging my memories away and murdering them, one by one. I would tell you these sterile, white walls they’ve put me behind are the real killer.
I stare into the mirror, attempting to recall the reflection of thirty years ago. A face flashes through my mind and I snatch at it, briefly grasping the edge, filling myself for a moment with the color and vibrancy that was a part of me-
It’s gone. Grey stares back at me.

I hobble into my bedroom. The pictures are tacked onto the white walls, snapshots of moments I can no longer recall without aid. A stack of at least a hundred more sit on the nightstand by my bed, spanning fifty years.
Every day, I attempt to put more photos on the wall in the order they occurred. It helps me remember and keeps me sane.
I take a photo from the top of the stack- grey and creased, like my reflection. A tousle-haired child of about twelve stands in front of a rundown farmhouse, one hand resting on the head of a spotted dog. The flat grasslands in the background show my beginnings; the farmhouse shows the place where I feared I would ultimately end. That same child flashes through my memory, now seventeen years old and slipping out of a second story window, bag in hand.
I never returned.
I pin the picture where the timeline begins, near the door. My mother’s face, my father’s hands, my brother’s tombstone… All appear and are gone again.
My hand shakily reaches for the stack again. There I am as a young adult, standing in the middle of a crowded city street, glowering at the camera with a cigarette dangling between my lips. It is the portrait of youth and recklessness, from the slouch of my shoulders to the holes in my jeans and jacket.
A sensation grips my gut- pain, pain I can remember with sudden and frightening clarity. Hunger pains. I had no money and no food. That cigarette probably came off the sidewalk.
The city is Chicago… I am poor and starving. I must be twenty-two, and it must be the end of the decade, when war was pulling men out of their homes and jobs and killing them in a faraway jungle.
I tack it onto the wall. The gap between my twelve year old self and Chicago is significant... I must work on that later. For now, the next picture in the stack must go up.
I lift it gingerly from the nightstand and squint down at it. The achromatic face staring back at me is not familiar: a woman with bobbed hair and a strand of pearls, standing next to a Ford pickup. She is giving the camera a smile that says she wishes nothing more than to leave; her hand is on the door handle, and she has a small suitcase by her feet. The pumps she’s wearing are the kind you wear to a funeral- stiff, dark, and conservative.
I have no idea who she is.
I place the photo gingerly on my pillow, as if I’m afraid of disturbing the woman within. She will have to wait until I find her floating in the deep waters of my memory. On to the next picture.
The face of the person I loved meets my eyes- a clear, hazel gaze, lips twisted in a perfect smirk, a slight dimple in one cheek, an eyebrow arched in sarcasm. Age cannot blur what I was born seeking; this face has been impressed in my memory since before my soul was given a body.
Not to say our walk was perfect. The stars melted quickly from our eyes. Debt, death, and disillusion walked with us for most of our marriage. At times, we drifted apart, sometimes for years. Grief caused me to open up and seek help, while my other half sought solitude and attempted to heal in quiet.
The hand I wanted most was not always there when I reached for it. But at the end, when I woke up one night to realize I was the only one in the room still breathing, that hand was in mine, still warm.
The old, familiar ache lodges in my chest and I close my eyes for a moment. The pain is almost sweet, ripened by the time we spent together and matured by what we went through.
This memory is clearer than my own reflection. I shuffle to the bathroom and tape the picture to the mirror, then make my way back to the nightstand for another round in the ring.
The next picture I pick up shows a woman in her late teens or early twenties. She’s dressed in clothing so hideous it must be trendy for the times, and she’s showing the camera a sheet of paper, the pride it gives her evident in her huge smile.
This is my oldest, my daughter, on the day she received her acceptance letter to an Ivy League school I can no longer remember. She worked so hard, and deserved every bit of recognition she received. She graduated with honors and went on to become a leading figure in-
Her occupation has slipped my mind. I need to ask her the next time she visits. In the meantime, the picture goes on the wall, a few spaces before my twentieth wedding anniversary.  I only know this because of the photo stamp in the bottom right corner.
Another photo shows a group of people I don’t remember gathered around me as I blow out a cluster of candles on a birthday cake. I look fairly middle-aged, so maybe one of my fiftieth celebrations. I place it somewhere in the middle of the timeline and move on.
I go through five more pictures, all vague snapshots of times in my life that seemed important in the moment. A new car, a day on the beach, a fancy dinner…
No wonder my mind has left these behind. I lay them to the side to be examined later and slide another Kodak moment off the top of the stack, a blurry snapshot of a boy with a chipped front tooth. The defect doesn’t taint his otherwise perfect smile. It stretches from ear to ear, accented by an Orion’s belt of freckles across the bridge of his snub nose. He’s standing on a sidewalk in a suburb, a blue bicycle at his feet. For some reason, the bike is more familiar to me than the face. I remember finding it in the road one evening…
The blue paint is scratched, and I feel anger welling up in my chest. I paid for that bike, after all. And now look at it.
I close my eyes. Scratched paint, a bent handlebar… and in the dim evening light, something else… Something lying a little ways down the street…
I am wheeling the bike into my garage and weeping. I am too old to be crying this hard. My knees hit the concrete and I rest my head on the seat and mourn something precious.
My brow furrows with concentration as I reach deeper. My heart beats faster, as if my body is rebelling against the strain of remembering.
The bike never leaves the garage again. My spouse covers it with a sheet and when we sell the house, the bike stays in the garage. I go to say goodbye to it before we drive away for the last time.
The sheet comes off in a cloud of dust and cobwebs, and as it does, my mind suddenly floods with light and I collapse onto the bed.
My son. My son has died. I found his body at the end of the street.
I weep as I wept thirty years ago, when the hearse carried us away from the gravesite. My second child, ten years old, snuffed out by a Chevy pickup as twilight fell over our quiet neighborhood.
For once, my memory seems incapable of failing. Every detail pierces me with perfect clarity: my daughter’s cry when she comes to find me that night, my loved one’s silence as I weep uncontrollably on the day of his burial, my youngest child going to his brother’s room and sleeping with the teddy bear he left behind so it wouldn’t be lonely its first night alone…
My hands shake as I cover my face and cry. This is too much. Too much. I must stop, I must let the memories fade. I will take them all off the walls-
And that’s when I hear his voice. Clear as if he was sitting on the bed next to me. His last words to me before that fateful bike ride.
“I love you- don’t forget.”
The tears feel hot enough to carve canyons into my already marked face.
Don’t forget. Don’t forget.
The waves crashing through my mind dredge up memories that flash before my vision in Technicolor. My first dog dying, my father’s raised voice, the pink slip on my desk, the doctor soberly informing me of the Alzheimer’s…
A childish voice echoes across the storm.
Don’t forget.
I must carry these memories. He deserves it. My loved ones deserve it. Whatever time I have left, I must remember. All of these memories, even the ones that cut me to the core, make me what I am. My fear of forgetting stems from a fear of losing myself.
“Don’t forget.”
My voice breaks the silence between the white walls. It’s a promise to these pictures, a promise to the self I see represented in each snapshot and to the loved ones who shared such precious moments with me, a promise to my cracked reflection-
The waves calm. The roaring ceases, and the memories recede like the tide. The water ripples, then is still.
I drag my hand through a pool of collected memory. Drops of forgotten moments, of long-loved family members, of tearful nights, catch on the tips of my fingers and threaten to fall away.
But I will not forget.