My Memory

This is an entry for Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge here.

He’s a wonderful person, and always has been. I love him with all my heart. Cliche? Absolutely, but sometimes they honestly do describe something perfectly.

We met a long time ago, when we were twenty, I think, well, I was twenty, he was a bit older. He was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It’s funny what love can do to you. I look back at old pictures and I realize he was actually pretty average looking, but back then, no one was better looking. We dated and took things slowly, but I had loved him almost immediately. It took him awhile to feel as strongly about me, but I always felt we were fated for each other. He would come around eventually.

This all must be very dull. After all, we weren’t exactly a unique relationship. Sure, there were details that made ours different than all others, but really, we were just an average couple. There was nothing special about us at all. Even though we weren’t, I felt like we were. That’s what love will do for you, or, at least, what it did for me.

Our wedding was magical. Yes, I know, it was ordinary as well, but every wedding is magical. I still remember it, every detail. We got married in a little church. You know the kind, completely filled with pews and a single aisle down the center? This one had stained glass portraits on either side of the chapel. It almost seemed like it was made for weddings. I remember walking down the aisle, all eyes on me. I remember his smile, like he had everything he could ever want, when he looked at me. I remember looking into his eyes, pale blue, like the sky, and not wanting to ever look away, even for the ceremony. He had a crimson broach attached to his sharp, black tuxedo. I’m sure the preacher was frustrated with us staring at each other for so long during our vows that we left a perfect silence for nearly a minute. When we walked out of the church to the slick, black car that was waiting for us, the guests threw rice in the air, leaving little white specks on the shoulders of his jacket. I can picture every little thing about that day, clearer even than the photographs I still have.

***

He’s been sick for awhile now. The doctors say there’s nothing they can do. He could die very soon, they say. People tell me I should put him in a nursing home, where he can get better care. I just can’t do that. If he’s going to die, he should die in his bed, with me at his side. He’s in so much agony, and I’m in agony seeing him like this. I’m scared, he’s not even himself anymore. Every day, he loses a little more of himself, just like the doctors said he would.

The other day, I asked him about our wedding. He said he remembered it, but when he described it to me, it was a jumbled mess. Almost nothing he said matched my memory of it at all. I couldn’t take it, I ran out that room and cried in the living room.

I’m scared. I don’t want him to die. I’ve spent so much of my life with that man, but I’m scared and angry. He can go on in terrible, lucid length about his childhood, but he can’t even remember our wedding? It’s not fair! The memory we used to share is no longer coherent. Nothing about our life together is. He’s not even the man I loved anymore. The pain of loving a man who doesn’t even remember my name is almost too much to bear. Still, I don’t want him to die.