Before I Forget

Thirteen hours since I opened my eyes.

I'm writing this now because I don't know yet what's temporary and what isn't, and I'd rather have this down while I can still put what I'm experiencing into words.

The surgery happened. There was something on the right side of my neck, close to the carotid artery and the jugular vein, close enough to the brain that the location alone carried real risk. That's separate from what the doctors have been treating in my head. I was warned, before any of this, that surgery could affect my memory. Not that it would. Just that it might.

Now it's after, and I don't know which parts of what I'm feeling are the surgery, or the medication, or exhaustion, or something that isn't going to go away. Nobody's told me that yet. I'm not going to guess.

So I keep testing myself. What day is it. What did I eat this morning. Who came in and when. Someone said something to me a few hours ago and I'm trying to remember the exact words, not just the shape of them. Some of it comes back whole. Some of it comes back in pieces. Some of it doesn't come back when I expect it to, and that's the part I can't get past.

Because here's the thing nobody warns you about. You don't feel a memory leave. You only find out later, by accident, when something comes up and your face doesn't do what a face is supposed to do when it remembers. How do you notice something's gone if you need that same thing to notice it?

A word went missing earlier today. An ordinary one, the kind I've used my whole life, written a thousand times, taught with. I reached for it and it wasn't there. A Bengali word showed up instead, in its place, without my permission. I don't know what that means. I'm not going to pretend I do. I only know it scared me more than the thing in my neck did, and that surprised me.

Before the surgery, in the weeks leading up to it, I kept catching myself in the middle of ordinary things, thinking, this might be the last time I do this the way I've always done it. I opened my notebook one night, same cover, same cramped margin, same habit of underlining the first line twice for no reason. I stopped with the pen on the page and thought, will my hand still know how to do this after. It sounds like a small thing to be scared of. It wasn't small at two in the morning.

I expected the thing in my neck to be what kept me up. It wasn't. It was the thought of waking up and not being sure I was the same person who went in.

I've spent most of my adult life around books and writing, so I already knew that memory isn't just information. Knowing it never really helped, not lying awake before surgery and not now either. Memory is the only proof I have that certain people mattered to me the way I remember them mattering. If some of it doesn't come back, I don't know what happens to the fact that it happened. I'm not going to answer that tonight. I don't think I can.

Around the same time all this was happening in my body, someone I loved got distant. I'm not going to explain why. Partly because I don't fully understand it myself, and partly because that's not what this is for. I don't think they were cruel. I felt alone at exactly the point I most needed not to be, and that's the truth I can actually stand behind.

There was no fight. No door slammed. Just replies that came slower, then slower, then some of them didn't come. I'd check my phone for nothing. Put it down. Pick it back up ten minutes later out of habit, even knowing nothing had changed. You can be in a room full of people and still be completely alone in it. Nobody tells you how ordinary that feels from the inside.

I loved them. Some tired part of me still does. I still have complicated feelings about it, and I don't need them to resolve.

There were nights, somewhere in the middle of all this, when I didn't want to be alive anymore. I'm saying that straight, because softening it would be a lie. I'm not going to describe what that felt like beyond that. It wasn't dramatic. It felt like being tired in a way sleep couldn't fix.

I'm still here. I'm not calling that a win. Some nights, staying alive just meant getting to morning and doing it again the next night.

I don't have a future I can describe with any confidence. I used to think in years. Now I think in the space between one appointment and the next, and even that isn't solid yet.

I don't have a lesson at the end of this. I've read enough essays that wrap up clean, and I don't trust myself to fake one tonight.

What I have is smaller. I can still hold a pen. My handwriting still looks like mine. I think. I'm not fully trusting my own read on that right now.

I don't know what I'm simply too tired to remember right now, and I don't know what I'll remember differently tomorrow. I don't know if what's missing right now is something I'll get back, or something that's just gone.

But right now, I'm here, and I can still write.

That's enough for this moment.