Write a story based on a line from a movie.  (June 28, 2025, Out of the Box Prompt.)

---

“The worst part is I’m starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her. Every day.” (Ricardo Morales from “The Secret in their Eyes”.)

How can you forget the person you love? How can I have looked you in the eye morning after morning, kissed you good night and now, your name is all but a cypher. A code I cannot break. Everything I do, and yet I cannot conjure up the memories of you as I once did.

You are my love. In my notepad – the one where I jot my most important information into – I write your name over and over until it looks like a meaningless scribble, scrawled letters without any context.

I’m too young for this forgetting disease. But they told me it’s not the brain plaque like some folks get. It’s something different, and, of course, the doctors have explained it to me in a thousand different ways. Each time, I think I understand and I write it down, but when I try to read it later, none of it makes sense.

I curl my hand into a fist and slam it onto my desk. It’s frustrating. I feel like a child, or worse, a lab rat.

Telling myself I’ll remember makes no difference. I always end up forgetting. Your name is just empty syllables. Even when I say it, it is ash in my mouth.

I want to curse, but all the words are the same. I curl my hand into a fist and slam it onto my desk. When I look into a mirror, I scarcely recognize the woman I have become. When I pass you in the hall, you are a stranger. Weeping, I beg you to remind me who you are, who we were.

So, you do.

You don’t just say our names, but you tell the history of us. The way you kiss me like the very act of kissing would braid our souls together. You tell me how though you always loved me, you never married me.

At this, I feel my brows furrow.

You explain, “I never wanted to steal your wild. You were a flower I did not want to pluck from the earth.”

I feel myself smile. I feel myself soften.

I wish I could let go because even in forgetting, I still find pieces of you I remember.

Often, you take me into your arms and dance with me, whisper about the scent of the seasons. Spring – honeysuckle. Summer – fresh vanilla. Fall – cinnamon and bon fires. Winter – impending snow storms. You say my scent is your favorite.

That I smell of autumn. I am a woman of cinnamon sticks and bon fires.

But I do not know why. I never wear perfume.

Yet you breathe me in as though I will save you. I begin to forget you.

One day, I struggle for breath. It’s hard to remember. These basic tasks. This remembering.

I gasp. The breath is fleeting. The memories are going, too. I want to say goodbye, good night, but I can’t even remember the breathing.

---

Eleven years is a long time. You’ll forgive me, won’t you, my love?

We watched the sun rise like a film strip from a movie, drinking Darjeeling tea, every morning. Every moment felt like magic. Her hair, like cinnamon and bon fires. Her skin left me breathless. Enchanted.

We whispered our secrets into the bottom of the kettle and into the shape of each other’s ears, like forming mists and watching them drift away. One morning, after telling my sins, I knotted her a dandelion ring, the only promise I ever knotted her. I asked forever.

Her eyes glittered with tears as she accepted.

It wasn’t marriage, but it was love. I thought when I said forever, I’d wake up with wrinkles etched in our faces. Eleven years is a long time.

She’s been gone, and graves are unyielding, unforgiving. The worst part is I’m starting to forget. I have to constantly make myself remember her.

Every day.

Yet she was the one with the forgetting disease.

My mind is slowing, wading through the molasses-pain of grief, yet the anguish is thick and blurs the details. I wish I could remember, but maybe forgetting is safer. Numbness is safe. There’s a reason surgeons anaesthetize.

But I pull out our photo books. I find the videos I made and listen to her voice. Her lilting accent like a song. Her eyes haunt me, begging me love, love, love, even in memories I scarcely remember.

Forgetting feels safer.

Was she always crying out for help? Was she always begging me for answers?

I wish I could let go because even in forgetting, I still find pieces of her I remember.

Isabelle Palerma

This short story is entirely my own content – no A.I. used to create this.