I can feel it now — the thinning. Not a storm. Something more like humidity, settling into the corners of a room until you notice, all at once, that the walls have gone soft with damp. I look up and an hour is missing. I look down and I don’t know why my hands are wet.
The first time, I was standing in a doorway, one hand on the frame. I couldn’t remember why I’d come into the room. Small thing. A held breath. But he noticed before I did.
“You’ve been standing there a while,” he said. “Like you’re listening for something.”
I laughed it off. But when I reached for the memory it wasn’t a fog, it was a hole — clean-edged, empty all the way down.
Then I lost a whole morning. Gone — not blurred, not hazy. Absent, the way a tooth is absent after it’s pulled, the tongue still checking the space where it used to be.
“What else will I lose?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
The worst of it wasn’t a single afternoon. It was waking up one day and not recognizing my own hands — the calluses, the old scar on the left thumb, familiar as a stranger’s. I held them up to the light like they belonged to someone else.
“These are mine?” I asked.
“They’re yours,” he said quietly.
I knew that the way you know a fact you’ve read, not the way you know your own body.
I understood then that this wasn’t taking minutes from me. It was taking the pieces I was built from — years going soft at the edges, whole rooms of myself standing empty.
But memory doesn’t only leave. Sometimes it comes back, and it doesn’t knock first.
I was at the sink, hands in warm water, mind somewhere else, when it hit — a voice, close and sharp, calling my name. Old, familiar, gone again before I could catch hold of whose it was.
“Barney!”
I jerked and sloshed water across the counter, my heart slamming once, hard, against my ribs. Not a memory drifting up from somewhere far off. A memory standing right behind me.
“I heard someone,” I said. “I actually heard someone call me.”
I’d thought remembering would feel like relief. It felt like being grabbed by a stranger who knew my name.
He came and put his hands on my shoulders, steadying me the way you’d steady something about to tip.
“Sometimes the hard ones come back first,” he said.
I didn’t know if that was comfort or warning.
So I did the only thing that felt like it would hold. I got the notebook. Sat at the table. My hand was shaking enough that the first letters came out jagged.
My memory is fading.
Then: I am afraid of disappearing.
Then, without meaning to write it: I am still myself.
He stood in the doorway and didn’t come closer.
“What are you writing?” he asked.
“What I know,” I said. “Before I don’t.”
I closed the notebook the way you’d close a lid on something alive.
That night I told him the rest of it. “It’s fading fast. Faster than I let on.”
He didn’t argue with me. Didn’t try to talk me out of what my own mind was telling me.
He just sat down next to me, close enough that our shoulders touched, and said, “I see you.”
I didn’t understand what he meant.
“Not the forgetting,” he said. “You. Still trying. Still here.”
I looked at my hands — unsteady, but mine.
We sat there a long time without talking. The forgetting doesn’t stop for that. But for as long as we sat there, it didn’t matter more than the sound of him breathing next to me.
I am still here.
Someone sees me.
I wrote it down, so I wouldn’t have to trust myself alone with it.
Barney Jaime Pearson, 2026
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