She Forgets Me Every Morning.

The first time she forgot, I thought it was a joke.

Ellie had always been playful, the kind of woman who left notes in my shoes, who named the spider in the corner “Gerald,” who kissed me every morning and said, “Nice to meet you, stranger.”

So when she looked at me one Wednesday morning with blank eyes and asked, “Who are you?” I smiled. I told her I was the man lucky enough to marry her.

She smiled back, unsure, and laughed in that familiar way that made my heart want to sing.

But the next morning, it happened again.

And again.

The doctors used complicated words like early-onset Alzheimer’s, temporal lobe degeneration, and progressive deterioration. None of them could tell me when it would stop. Only that it wouldn’t.

“She may forget more,” they said. “Possibly everything.”

But I remembered.

I remembered the café where we met—she ordered tea and spilled honey on my book. I remembered how her hands trembled when she first told me she loved me. I remembered our wedding, how she whispered, “Promise me, even when I forget the words, you’ll still speak them.”

I promised.

So now, every morning, I do the same thing.


---

I wake before her. I brew the tea just the way she likes it—lavender and mint, three sugar cubes, no milk. I set it by her side of the bed, then sit in the old rocking chair across the room.

When her eyes flutter open, I see the same confusion creep in like fog. She blinks at the ceiling, then at the cup, then at me.

“Good morning,” I say softly. “I made you tea.”

She hesitates. “Do I... know you?”

And I smile, even though my chest aches. “Not yet. But you will.”


---

Some days, she asks questions. “Where are we?” “Are you a nurse?” “Do I have a job?”

Some days, she just nods and sips her tea, quiet and cautious, like a deer unsure of its surroundings.

But every day, around the time the sun leans through the curtains and catches the dust in golden beams, something in her sparks.

It might be a joke I make.

Or a song on the radio.

Or the way I tuck a flower behind her ear while pretending to be clumsy.

Something breaks through the fog.

Her eyes widen.

And she says, almost like a gasp: “It’s you.”


---

That moment—those three words—are why I get up every day. Why I wait through the silence, the questions, the pain.

Because in that instant, she knows me.

Not just my name, not just my face.

She remembers us.

All of it.

And for that hour, or two, or sometimes just a fleeting minute, I get her back.

She tells me stories she’s told a hundred times. She hums our wedding song. We dance in the kitchen while toast burns in the oven. We laugh until she cries, and I pretend I don’t see the tears because I’m too busy kissing them away.

Then slowly, like dusk swallowing the day, she drifts.

She forgets again.

And I let her go gently, guiding her to rest, brushing her hair behind her ear.


---

At night, when she’s asleep, I write in a journal. I fill it with what she remembered, what she smiled at, what made her laugh. I write it for me, yes—but mostly for her. For the woman who wakes each morning not knowing who she is or who I am.

Because love, I’ve learned, isn’t just memory.

It’s patience.

It’s presence.

It’s showing up for someone who cannot show up for you in the same way—and doing it anyway.


---

Tomorrow, she will forget me again.

But I will remember her.

Enough for bothfs