Say You'll Remember Me

by Abby Jimenez

I never get why white men are grumpy. Like, we’re living in a patriarchy. You’re the most privileged class on the face of the earth. You’re not walking to your car with your keys through your fingers like wolverine and you’ve got bodily autonomy, why the bad mood?” “What did he look like?” she asked. “Like if Rhysand from the ACOTAR series were a real person,”

You know how when someone dies, all anyone cares about is how? Somehow the moment that takes them out is more interesting than decades worth of life and accomplishments and living. I hated it.

“My mom has dementia,” she said. “She’s fading away and I haven’t been home in seven months. Everyone is taking care of her but me and she doesn’t know my name anymore and I feel like that’s my fault because I could have come sooner but I didn’t because I wanted to forget it was happening. And then it happened without me and now I can’t get it back.” There was pain in her voice.

She wasn’t there. Like a light had been turned off.

I wondered if the dementia felt like walking through a gray version of the world. And then all of a sudden a bright blue car from your youth appears and you know something again. You remember, and it’s the only thing in color.

The promise of something can be so vibrant. And everything feels so dull after it’s gone.

I didn’t care that she remembered him. I was glad she did. I cared that she didn’t remember me. What about me made me less permanent? Why did I fade to gray when everyone else was bright?

I was going to go broke coming here. I knew it immediately.

But mostly I liked that he felt turned toward me. Like I was the only thing interesting in this place full of interesting landmarks and people and things.

“Uh-huh. Would you be jealous if I was talking to my exes?” Mask. I gasped. “You would! You’re obsessed with me, Xavier.” He looked down, humor around his eyes. When he looked back up, his gaze had gone a touch serious. “I like it when you say my name.”

I smiled. “Xavier,” I whispered. “Xavier. Xavi—” He leaned forward and kissed me. I didn’t expect it. I did, but I didn’t. It took my breath away.

“That there is nothing more beautiful than being a witness to someone’s life. To know them inside and out and be with them through everything, share the same memories. Memories are everything. I want that.”

This had to be its own type of hell for him. She was here but she wasn’t. She hadn’t died so he couldn’t stop grieving her or move on. He just had to watch her forget their entire life together. Forget him and forget herself too. The snowball melting at the bottom of the hill.

He’d come back for me. It was so… everything. It was romantic and sweet and what every woman wants—only I knew that even though I wanted him, this was bad. An addiction that would only get stronger and I’d never get enough of him to satisfy me. This was reckless. Completely irrational. We could never work.

“I missed you,” he whispered from behind me. “I can’t stop thinking about you. I tried. I really did. And I’m sorry I came here without telling you the truth, but I didn’t think you’d see me and I just… I just needed to be in the same room as you.” I let out a puff of air. “We can’t do this,” I breathed. “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.

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.

This was what they meant when they talked about the one who got away. She’s the woman you never stop remembering, the one who haunts you. The one who stays at the front of your mind even when decades pass. And I had to figure out how to make this work. I had to. I didn’t have any choice.

We stood there in silence. Another layer of Mom’s dignity, stripped. One less thing she had agency over.

And he was going to live where the seasons turned, and I was going to live where they didn’t and somehow we’d still have to try to be on a parallel line. There would be weeks upon weeks of boring gray without him and then two or three days of color. And that would be what we got. I could break up with him and suffer. Or I could date him and take what I could. Make memories when I could. With everything in life, it’s what you can live with. It always is. And this was still better than nothing.

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.

It’s ironic how important things make the world smaller. How a kiss with someone you love can make you feel like you’re alone with them, like you’re in a snow globe with just the two of you when really you’re outside baggage claim at a busy international airport.

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. I would be content just following her around a grocery store in exchange for nothing more than the moment that I wouldn’t even remember later. I’d just remember it had been a good day and that I’d been happy.

I thought Mom’s dementia was cruel. It was cruel. It was a long goodbye. But no goodbye was just as bad.

“Some things are worth remembering, Samantha. No matter how much they hurt.”

“I love my wife. I always will. There are days I’d rather be dead than have to live through the things happening to her,” Dad said. “Her body might still be here, but she is gone and she has been for a very long time. I am a full-time caregiver to someone who barely knows my name. I will not apologize for what I have to do to make it so I can wake up in the morning to the reality I’m forced to endure. My life is a permanent, intolerable unhappiness. And I pray you never know what that’s like.”

“I would trade everything for one more day with my wife. Everything. If you love that girl even half as much as I loved my Claire, you will pack your bags and leave yesterday.” He nodded at the back room. “None of this matters. None of it. It’s just stuff. You can build another clinic somewhere else, but that? What you have with her? That is not easy to find. The universe doesn’t just hand out true love. And I know that’s what this is because I see you’re willing to kill yourself over it. So if you have that, if you’re one of the lucky ones, why in God’s green earth would you give it up?”

“I met this young man there,” he said. “Long time ago. Probably seventeen, eighteen years now. I thought about him for over a decade. Never stopped really. He came in with this collie mix, I’ll never forget her name. Winnie.” I froze.

He pushed up on his knees and stood. “All I’ve got left are memories. You still have a chance to make them. I’ll be disappointed if you don’t.”

My life was full of nevers. A mom who would never say my name again. Jewelry still lost that I’d never find. A boyfriend who I’d never get the chance to get sick of.

“I want to stop living one flight to California at a time. I want to wake up every day and be alone in a room with you. I want to witness your life and have you witness mine. I want a parallel line and the fantasy world we talked about to be real. I want us to make memories.”

Mom was standing in the door of the gazebo watching us. She was beaming from ear to ear. She knew. Something ingrained that told her she was seeing true love. Her heart remembering even though her brain had forgotten. She didn’t know who I was or who he was. But she still knew what love was.

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.

Hank had changed our lives a few times, actually, starting when my husband was just a boy. Hank was a ripple in the ocean of our love story. If it hadn’t been for him, Xavier would never have become an animal doctor and he and I would have never met.

Hank stood in as father of the groom at the wedding. And he looked so proud.

Mom didn’t ask about her much anymore. Every once in a while, but not like before. She was forgetting. The memories were smearing. For once I was glad they were.

All Mom knew was that she was loved. Her son put her to bed at night and her husband woke her up every morning and took her down to breakfast with her grandkids and her daughters and a son-in-law she met for the first time every day when he made her eggs. She had witnesses to her life—and love. She was surrounded by love. And there’s nothing more beautiful.