I keep trying to remember everything, but I just can’t. If I remember to write in the morning, I forget to take my pills. If I remember to take down the garbage, I forget to clean the cats’ litter boxes. I have trouble filling my pill containers with a list. I can carry on a conversation, but I forget to tell the main idea of a story, or I fall into drunk talking when I’m tired but don’t recognize it until later when I’ve rested. There are stories I’ve told that I had only ever told Mike and Nick. I make lists then forget to check them.
I drop things too. Three days ago, I broke two bowls in one fell swoop. What the heck is a fell swoop? A few weeks ago, I broke one of my grandma’s glasses. The other day, after I broke the bowls, I swept up a pill from the floor that I must have dropped. I’m glad the cats were smart enough not to eat it.
Yet, I can still remember the list of words the cranial, carotid, cognitive therapist gave me to test my memory. I made them into a story: candle sugar wagon hotel farmer village sandwich feather artist paper. It was a stupid story, but it was a story and now I can still remember it even though I don’t need to. I still work fairly well on exercises with my students, though my lessons are getting a little repetitive. Don’t worry. I’m on it. I have a list of concepts that I often forget to check.
But I can still see beauty in the world. I can still comprehend and appreciate geometry, visualize the planets spiraling behind the sun as it rushes its own orbit around a black hole, and hopefully write a decent sentence though my spelling is slipping away and, now that I look at it, my sentence structures are simplifying themselves. Dammit, I’ll have to do some editing. Editing is exhausting.
It’s hard to find a bright side to this. There are so many things on my body I would have preferred to break instead of breaking my brain. Maybe you’ll be entertained and enlightened as I spiral into my black hole. Maybe it’ll just be tragic with no redeeming features.
Thank you for listening, jules