Each morning she wakes
as if birthed from ash—
a faint whisper of the woman
who once filled the house with salt and laughter.
Her name, once stitched
into every page of the world,
now drifts like smoke
through corridors she does not recognize.
She touches the spoon,
but it has no memory.
She turns toward the voice,
but the voice is too far inside the fog
to reach her.
Time does not move for her.
It folds, collapses,
collides upon itself
like a dream halfway remembered
and then forgotten.
In her eyes—
oceans with no shoreline,
mirrors that no longer return the gaze
of those who love her.
I have watched her speak to the wind
as if it were her brother.
She calls to the past
as if it were still standing
on the front porch,
waiting to be let in.
What cruelty,
that the body stays
while the soul
drifts further and further from the shore.
She clutches my hand
and calls me a name
I do not know.
But I answer.
Because love must answer,
even when it is not remembered.
She smells the lavender
in the pillow
and smiles,
as if it were a secret only she remembers—
but even that joy slips
before it roots.
Her hands forget
how to hold
what they have held a thousand times—
the teacup,
the brush,
the face of her child.
And still she breathes.
Still she walks.
Still she lives.
But the map is gone,
and every step is a question
left unanswered.
I want to hold her entire life
in the palm of my hands—
protect it from the wind,
from the forgetting.
But I cannot.
She is becoming
a watercolor in the rain,
the outline fading
until only the silence remains.
This is how she disappears.
Not in death,
but in petals,
in pieces,
in pauses between the words
she no longer knows.
Broken Author 