Remembering You

You look at me, but you don’t see me.

You don’t know me.

You don’t remember me.

To you, I am a stranger. Your blue eyes fill with fear when I approach. When I touch your hand, you pull away with a gasp.

I’m overwhelmed just looking at you. An avalanche of memories overtakes me in a way I both welcome and resist. Sometimes, the memories are catalogued and coherent, sometimes they are fragments and pieces that seem torn out of a random chapter in our story. They are beautiful and marred. They hurt to recount, but I can’t help it. I have to.

Because you don’t.

You don’t remember when our fingers first brushed in the library, your nose buried in some brilliant tome about the laws of physics, mine in a Tom Clancy novel. You don’t remember how beautiful you looked when you blushed at the contact.

You don’t remember when I asked you to marry me, and I nervously stumbled through it and you couldn’t believe that I got choked up. You don’t remember your laughing response, Of course I’ll marry you, you big crybaby!

You don’t remember hearing our babies’ first cries, or struggling to pay our mortgage, or late nights of watching movies together after the kids were in bed. You don’t remember thousands of I love yous and goodnight kisses and dinner dates and how our hands just always seemed to fit together.

Good years and bad ones, laughter and tears, it’s all gone to you now.

You certainly don’t remember last summer, sitting in the doctor’s office and hearing the words early onset.

I like to imagine that somewhere inside you, whatever it was that made you you remembers me.

But even if that part’s gone forever, I’ll still be here.

Remembering you.