Unreliable Narrator

My heart stopped, breath caught in my throat.

I know this man.

Those eyes. Inky black, deep, and dead. Bitter like bad coffee. His beard, neater now, grey, but it’s him. A crisp white kufi squarely atop his regal crown.

Three years together in a cell, breathing the same stale air, on our hands and knees, cleaning the same worn floor.

But I’m a total blank. His name, gone like smoke.

Precipitation

The neurologist's finger traces ghostly patterns across my brain scans.

"Here," he taps the film, "is where memory lives. And here -" his finger drifts to a darker region, "is where it dies."

The temporal lobe, withering like forgotten fruit.

I nod, pretending to understand the colored splotches.

What I really understand was my father's face, his vacant smile.

The inner-city kid, who'd never seen the ocean, until he spent six months reading every sailing manual, navigation guide, and captain's log he could find.

Then bought a 40-foot Catamaran, sailed the Caribbean like he'd been born to it.

The man who'd memorized navigation charts half a world away. Now couldn't find his way to the bathroom.

Erosion

I watched Alzheimer's take my father piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse.

First, the edges - the name of a book he'd just finished, where he left his glasses. Then, whole sections, fading away.

The worst was the recognition. I could see it in his eyes.

This brilliant man, this perpetual student of everything, slowly losing access to all that carefully curated knowledge.

He knew it was slipping away, too. Talked about it. But couldn’t stop it.

Preservation

I document everything now, every day.

Old friends, street names, our high school mascot, scribbled into morning pages. Night fills notebooks with the day’s conversations, song lyrics, the way the bartender at McKinley's calls everyone "boss" except for me, who he calls "chief."

My wife says, "You're fine. You’re just making it worse."

But she doesn't understand.

We’ve all had the experience of walking into a room with no memory of why we entered in the first place.

I have that, too. But I don’t recognize the room. Or anything it holds. Or what any of it’s used for.

I stare into the refrigerator searching for the salt shaker. Open a cabinet expecting milk. Words vanish mid-sentence.

Is this how it starts?

Devotion

This cellmate that I had, whose name I can’t recall. We should’ve been at odds. Warring races. Warring religions.

Early on, right after we’d been thrown together, I came off the yard to meditate - my daily practice, five times a day.

We locked in a max facility. Heavy sliding steel doors without a window.

I yanked the heavy iron, it screeched open, slammed shut. Spun around, only to find him… kneeled on his prayer blanket - a thin weave over the concrete floor. Forehead to a small stone centered at the top of it.

I froze. Thinking for certain I was dead.

He continued his prayers… like I wasn’t there.

I waited till he stood, skirted past, climbed up into my bunk, settled in, and began my meditation.

We never spoke of it.

A few weeks later, with tensions eased, I managed a clumsy apology.

He looked me dead in the eye.

“If your entrance bothered me,” he said. “That would mean my salat is weak,” he paused. “My salat is not weak.”

Invention

I'm starting to suspect that writing things down isn't capturing my memories so much as creating them.

Each time I read an entry, I reinforce neural pathways. Real or invented, I'm laying down tracks where there might have been none.

There's a scientific term for this: confabulation. The creation of false memories to fill gaps. It's different from lying because in your mind, it’s true. Your brain, making sense of emptiness.

My wife finds me surrounded by notebooks at 3 AM.

"What are you doing?" she asks.

"Fact-checking," I say.

She kneels beside me. "Come to bed."

"I can't tell which parts are true anymore."

I weep.

Fabrication

The problem with writing everything down is you have to go back and read it. The problem with reading it is trusting it. The problem with trusting it is that I wrote it.

There are gaps in the notebooks now. Days missing. Entries that trail off mid-sentence.

I used to be able to write ten pages without stopping. Now I lose my train of thought between paragraphs.

My son visits. He picks up a notebook, flips through.

"This is good stuff, Dad," he says. "Is this a new novel?"

I don't correct him. I can't remember if these entries were meant to be fiction or if they're records of actual days.

"How's your mother?" I ask.

He gives me a strange look. "She's in the kitchen."

I nod like I knew that.

Projection

The doctors say Alzheimer's follows your bloodline like a bounty hunter.

I find myself writing down things that haven't happened yet, just in case. Just so I'll know how the story ends.

The pen feels awkward in my fingers these days. Sometimes I forget which hand to hold it in.

Keylea says, "You don't need to write everything down."

But I do.

Even as the words blur. Even as I sometimes forget what they mean.

Recollection

And yesterday, it came back to me. His name. My cellmate.

I wrote it down seven times in a row. Numbered them to be sure.

Today I checked the notebook. The page is blank. Or maybe I wrote it somewhere else. Maybe I never wrote it at all.

But for a moment, I had him back. I was back.

For a moment, I was whole.

---

السلام عليكم، أخي 🙏