Forget Me Not
By Derek Ellwood
Early Alzheimer’s was the diagnosis.
I did not sink.
Soon was the realization of the things that would cloud me:
When to eat,
The panicked grasp to recognize the faceless person I was talking to, the
Whispering eyes, starting at me from
Loved ones who were once not strangers.
So I gathered what thoughts I had
Amongst the bushes of huckleberries at Barview.
The same place my mother and I gathered them,
Laughing over the ones smeared all over my
Face, that didn’t make it into the bucket.
I sat on the old railroad tracks and sealed my eyes on the Coast Guard station,
Leaking out into Tillamook Bay, admiring how it steadied itself on
Barnacle and mussel-encrusted stillettos.
A cry from a long gul jarred my thoughts around reflection from the
Puzzle pieces that were about to go mission.
The shapes, depths, emotions that fit together
To form me would soon be
Permanent holes.
Alone, I tried to conceal my tears
Like the pier falling off into the
Abyss of a veiled fog.
I became an old fisherman in the Ghost Hole
Watching a collision of colored dragon-tailed streamers
Tangle and race through the fall skies over Garibaldi. We were an infusion, a graft of each other
Not fretting about forgetting.
When when my chest no longer
Rises like the incoming tides, there would be the things that would
Not forget me.
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