March and May and Everything in Between

I am sitting under the cold antiseptic lights of the doctor’s office and he is asking me my age. I hesitate before answering 68 and he makes a note of it in his chart. My wife is holding my hand as he gives us the details about dementia. Slowly my memories are fading and I am trying to come to grips with this. He hands my wife brochures about what to expect and she begins reading them as if they are my instruction manual now.

We are back home and I barely remember the drive. Is this because my condition is deteriorating or because I am lost in memories? We hold each other for a long time and her tears run down my arm. After a while she retires to bed but I tell her I feel like staying up. If my memories are finite there are some I need to enjoy before they are gone.

In the garage I find an old box full of old belongings I have always been too sentimental to throw out. I pour them out onto the floor and sift through them. A medal I won in high school. A prize from a county fair long past. Childhood trinkets and adult documents. Finally I come to a photo album covered in a sheet of dust. The binding is cracked and the cover is falling off. I crack it open and am flooded by the past.

Though I have been with my wife for 42 loving years of ups, downs, births and deaths she was not my first love. My first love came in my waning teen years when the entirety of the world seemed possible. She was petite and curious. Her face was like a spark of light and her hair burned a bright ember. She was artistic and used a camera often to chronicle our 2 years together. Much of the timeline is here before me as I turn the pages and am taken back, finding lost love once again.

It is a late summer and we are walking to a pool with our dry bodies brushing together and covered with the panes of sunlight that escape the trees and cast reverse leaves upon us that might otherwise never exist. Her arm is around my waist and she is warm. She is so warm that I hold her towel, she does not touch it. Children play all around us and we respond in kind. The water smells unnatural with chemicals. Her kiss tastes the same. Our bodies burn lightly with chlorine and the sun.

It is late afternoon of that day and the sun is dying out in the Midwest and dead already elsewhere and yet still bright further down this world and we are walking the same path in reverse with our bodies wet with sheets of water. Her other arm is around my waist and we wear our towels around our shoulders like capes and we are walking forward in time. The trees have taken our light and stolen our tattoos of leaves. They afford us a cold wind only and her body raises up involuntary to protect her. Her goose flesh releases the remaining water and it scatters down the bumps on her skin in fine drops to the road where it dissolves further. I spot a marigold and stoop to pluck it. I place it behind her ear and she smiles like a flower child. The petals are nearly lost in her hair.

I turn the page. It is now the dead of winter and we are shut in. Roads are impassible. She is reading and I am trying to stay interesting by asking her outside. She glances through the window and in her reflection I can see her face. There is a smile there far fainter than the day we swam.

We are bundled tightly and only a small lapse in her apparel allows her beauty to show. It is her hood and it is her face and I am watching her for signs. The door will not open all the way and we walk into a snowdrift that touches my hips. We walk clumsily to the yard and when we fall we fall together. Snow is seeping into the cracks of our clothes. She is laughing as we struggle to stand and she is kissing me as we struggle to remain standing. Our saliva freezes and creates a second skin. She drifts away and lobs a snowball at me. I watch it arcing until it finds my face in a sharp explosion of laughter. I can still feel it numb my cheeks. It is pitch black and yet the rolling fields of snow amplify the moon’s light and I can see her clearly. She is dancing there still in my mind. It begins to snow again and I inspect the ground. Between each fallen snowflake there exists a microscopic crack wherein lies another snowflake and on and on until their infinite earthen demise. Like memories, I think.

It is an indeterminate day at the end of spring. I have pushed the date from my mind. I am barely awake and she is yelling about something I have done. I cannot register a defense. I cannot be interesting. The smile has disappeared completely from her face. She is in and out of the room and I cannot move from the bed. Over the following weeks she is barely there at all. I am touching the things that belonged to us. I am remembering the things we have done that she can never take but time will. These memories will shift like a forgotten dream. They are not mine anymore. I cannot take that walk to the pool whenever I like and when the false memory comes involuntarily perhaps she will be carrying my towel. We cannot always go into the snow but when we do I may remember throwing the snowball at her instead. Can I wipe the saliva before it freezes? Can she survey the ground and know how insignificant it all is? Will these new memories create a new present and future in my mind? Or will it all simply fade away for each relationship has a finite amount of moments and they all have a timeline. When it runs out there is no more need for memories.

I turn to the last page and the pressed marigold falls out. I scoop the brittle decaying form into my hands and lay it in the yard half hoping it will grow again. I walk down the driveway and pitch the photo album into the trash. In the end these were only my memories to lose. She does not remember them and my life with my wife has been something else entirely. She doesn’t need to remember my past.

It is a late summer and the pool water has completely dissolved in the road.

It is the dead winter and the snowflakes have reached the earth.

The water might have been the same and might still be.