Soon…

This one is for the Six-Sentence story prompt of VAULT by girl on the edge. I decided that since we are hitting that time of year I wanted to do something light, happy, and Christmas-y. Instead I wrote this incredibly depressing little story about a woman with Alzheimer’s, and while Christmas does get a cameo appearance, I pretty much missed the mark here.

My mind was like a vault with a faulty lock, keeping every memory of every moment safe from view, but opening at random, regardless of the combination that was entered.

One day it would be fine, I would know every face, every story, everything I should, and the next there would be a man standing before me that I knew as my boy David, but instead he called me Grandma.

On the bad days my thoughts were like marbles and I was trying to gather them in a bucket with a hole, each one more likely to roll away then to be spoken aloud. I would cry in frustration, as a child would, not understanding what was going on around me, and sometimes not even that I should.

The good days were sometimes worse, because I was clear, coherent, and a hundred percent aware of the fact that this wouldn’t last, that I was in this place because I was slipping away by degrees, while my family tried to hold on.

Today I sat looking out the window as the world was blanketed in snow, a cold beauty, peaceful in the stillness of night, and I smiled, because I knew that soon it would be Christmas again.

If you are thoroughly depressed, please stop here.

If you want an even darker interpretation of this, then I am going to tell you it’s entirely possible that it’s not going to be Christmas soon. It could have been last week, or months ago depending on where she is living. Yup, cause that story had to be even sadder… Merry Christmas