One Page #20

She wanted to savor the last moment they spent together. And she would remember this moment until her memory faded with old age. As her hair turned white and her teeth grayed and her fingers started shaking like leaves on a windy day she began writing down her memories. Her pen quivered on the page making scribbles in circles as she sat and looked out the window at the forest and the ducks that were flying overhead. She remembered yesterday and the day before, but everything else was fading away. She kept trying to hold on to it, but you can’t hold on to memory because the more you try the more elusive it is. Memory plays games, and every second that goes by alters your memories until soon they are nothing like what really happened, but you don’t know that because you can’t remember what really happened. And what really happened doesn’t matter anymore, what matters is that it did happen, and you wouldn’t be here today, pen in hand, if it hadn’t happened. So you can rest assured knowing that something happened, even if you can’t remember it. But she did remember that last moment pretty well. She remembered the smell of the new spring day, and the lilacs were just opening their petals and the hills were bursting green. They had stood before each other, looking, memorizing, and then disappearing. She remembered the last thing that happened, a finger to the tip of her nose so smooth with a perfectly rounded nail. There was a wink and a touch to the shoulder and then a turn of the head toward the sun. She caught the glimmer of gold in her ear and the long stretch of her neck angled impossibly, straining veins popping. They had looked at each other one last time, and the air felt velvet. The last moment was long as if the trees around them stopped rustling for just a moment and the birds paused in mid-flight. And then it was over and all she saw was a back and heels click clacking on the gravel road, bag bouncing against hip and hair flipping in the wind towards heaven. If a tree fell on her that very moment she would have died a happy woman. But now she couldn’t decide now whether she was happy or not. And maybe it didn’t matter. She looked at the paper and pen in front of her and wrote every detail that she could remember, but all she knew for sure was that her shirt was red and the sky was a brilliant blue and a hawk had flown through the trees with a caw caw shrieking. And the rest has been changed by many years of experience adding layers upon layers over the memory. She thought of the long, outstretched neck and how smooth the skin was under the chin when it was pulled taut, and she wrote that down too. Her hand shook.