Shared Birthday
Shared Birthday. Tomorrow is your birthday. Your real one, from your birth; not the one from your diagnosis. Alzheimer’s, said the doctor; the disease of forgetting, I say; unbearable, say others.
I bought your favorite cake, the one you taste every year as if it were the first time and say it could easily become your favorite cake. I will make shrimp rice with your own recipe, and you will say its flavor reminds you of something you can no longer remember.
The most painful thing about watching you slip away through the cracks of memory is going with you. I try to hold on to you to save myself from falling into the dark pits of your silence and see how you fade away, staring at the second hand of a clock that sometimes shows any random time and other times the clarity of eight twenty-seven.
I write to you so I don’t forget that I am your daughter, even if you no longer remember me and I am just a stranger living in your house. I write to keep myself safe from the place where everything lacks a name, where the past and the present become an alphabet soup with a riddle’s taste.
Happy birthday, Dad. It’s also my birthday. When they sing to us in front of our favorite cake, you will say: what a coincidence; and I will blow out the candles wishing that at least one more time you will remember me and before going to sleep you will say: God bless you, my daughter, see you tomorrow; and that in that tomorrow, you will not leave again.
