What have you got to lose?

Memories are like a book that is not bound. If you place them on the porch, they may blow away. If you place them on the kitchen counter, they may blow away.

The top pages will fly first, of course, and they are like short-term memories, things that just happened today or maybe yesterday.

And then the middle will fly, and then the last pages, which are the moments you thought you could never lose, the archive you chiseled, one finely sculpted piece at a time. The moments that mattered most.

A glove, a hat, a rose, a tree, a home, a book, a bird. A race to take things in before they disappear. First, the thing appears, then gets hazy and is gone. Then the memory of it disappears, too, as if it were never there.

One moment and it was all gone, being a mom, and a mom to my mom, and the stories I would tell my daughter and my grandchildren, if she had kids. They atomized – terse and telegraphic – shot into space in a configuration that looked like Lake Brain-is-Gone.

I could have one conversation every two or three days, then wilt or be fried to a crisp. It was like I’d never written before. If I ever knew any secrets, any rules of the road, I did not know them now. I wrote with the urgency that comes when time is short. I still do.

For a few millennia, death and resurrection have been a big theme. It goes something like this: someone, well, ok, a hero, leaves one condition and comes back in another.

Brain damaged people do this every day, minus the hero part.

Sort of like old things coming back new. The hero traversed a stretch of forest and landscape he'd never seen before and came back transformed. The hero was always a “he.” For some people, transformation takes years of effort. Others just get hit by a truck.