She’s senile.

She rises young each morning to look at the face in the mirror, which is only a memory.
A hallucination, really.

She sees the girl that lay on the floor of her bedroom for hours, wrapped in an ex boyfriend’s clothes, crying. She sees the girl who weaved through the streets of a little town every night—the kind of town where every car had at least two lights out but nobody paid notice. She knows this girl is gone, she knows this girl lives somewhere else now, somewhere far away where she too has passed from memory to hallucination. Yet she still sees her every morning, just that way she has for her entire life.

She’s alone, now. Nobody really visits. It doesn’t bother her much, she’s always liked to be alone. These days, she thinks a lot about where she’s going. She calls it a vacation.

When she was green, her grandmother would go on worldly travels every year and on holidays, would spread out a giant map and show them the places she’d gone.

Gracie can do the same thing with her hands. Sometimes, she spreads them out on the bed sheet and traces the lines and dents and bumps and studies the geography of them. All the years, all the travels right there in front of her.
A history book painted on every inch of her body.

Her face is the same. She looks at it “for real” every once in a while. She tries to see it for how it really is—etched deep with life. With travel. She touches her nose, the same one that’s sat there as long as she can remember.

She closes her eyes and she’s sitting on his bed again, surrounded by the bedroom of her first love.
He’s touching her nose, now. He is. He’s telling her that it’s beautiful, that there’s nothing wrong with it and she shouldn’t have it changed.
She’s falling deeper.

She looks into her own eyes, now, and sees her father.
The man that shared those eyes.
She sees long car rides and late night storytelling when she couldn’t fall asleep.
She wonders if he’ll be there, when she leaves for her vacation.

She’s senile.

The words she wanted to write were never written.
The euphoric splash of waves against the ocean wall near her childhood summer home never made it into any memoirs.
All of these events, stories, feelings are trapped inside a vessel that’s soon to depart.

But she’s ready.

Long back, she stopped flipping through the obituaries.
She decided that she’d rather be surprised by who else is waiting when she gets there.
She wonders, late at night, if her friends are there. She wonders if they look how she imagines them. How she hallucinates them.
She wonders if they’ll embrace her, if they’ll all laugh and run down to the woods to smoke pot and chase boys.

She wonders if he’ll be there. Will he remember her? She hopes she’ll finally gain the courage to tell him how she felt. How she feels still after all these years.

She wonders… will she be there?
It was so long ago, is she older? Do they age up there?
She wonders if she’ll be angry with her for sending her there so soon.
“Mommy will meet you there” she had cried into the pillow as she swallowed the pill. Then the second. Then the third.

She’s senile, on the outside.

Nurses walk past her every day. Doctors, too.
Janitors, visitors, other patients.
They see only an old woman waiting to move on.
They don’t see the memories, the connections, the triumphs, the downfalls.
They see a dying woman, a hallucination.
To them, she might as well already be dead.

But they’re just careless.
They’re senile.
Because she’s more.
She’s all she knows.

And soon all she knows will be a closed vault in another row of stones.