Say You'll Remember Me

by Abby Jimenez

Xavier sat with her on my mattress and smiled at her, talking softly to her in that way that hypnotized memory care patients, animals, and social media managers alike.

“Not seeing you is terrible,” he said quietly. “And I don’t want to do it anymore.” That’s it. I gave up. I turned around and kissed him.

There was a tiny glimmer of a chance. And I felt instant peace. The gnawing discontent of the last two months was finally quiet, and all I could think in this moment of relief was that I was kissing my wife. I couldn’t tell you how I knew this. A pristine realization on a dim porch in the middle of the night. The scent of her perfume bringing up memories of a beach under the moon, the sound of crashing waves, a kitten with fur that smelled like her, a shitty hotel room or a UFO that was the only place in the world I wanted to be, simply because she was in it.

With everything in life, it’s what you can live with. It always is. And this was still better than nothing.

I’d taken recognition for granted my whole life. The way it lights someone up, how it can speak to you without a word across a crowded room. That split second of raw reaction when you’re seen and known. Relief, joy, happiness at locking eyes with someone you were looking for or seeing someone you didn’t expect.

Him bursting through the door, grabbing me, and pulling me into a warm hug that instantly voided the chill in the air I squeezed my eyes shut and let myself feel it. I wanted to feel how it felt to come home. So this was going to be my life now. Long droughts without him, with short bursts of this. This was worth it.

“Because if you were my wife you would be my world. Everything starts with you and ends with you. Anything else is just the stuff that happens in the middle.”

You think that it’s the big memories you should be chasing—and it is in a way. Birthdays and vacations and special occasions. But the small memories are the fabric of your life, the ones so inconsequential that you don’t even remember them. You just remember how you felt when you were making them.

Maybe that’s the last thing we forget. Or we never forget it at all. Not really. We lose the words to say it. We lose the ability to show it. But we never lose the ability to feel it or recognize it when we see it. Love is the brightest color in a gray world.