Short Story
Her Words
A Story About The Words We Love and Lose
She was losing her vocabulary. She could no longer remember the words as they slipped away, but she knew they were missing, she remembered there had been something there, and then, there was a gap. No trick of the mind, no mnemonic method, no ritual nor rite staved off the loss. Age and a growing senility were robbing her of all her precious words, and there was nothing she could do to fight back. Nothing, that is, except place more envelopes upon the growing pile. It was not enough, she knew it was not enough, but she had to try something, anything to stave off the inevitable. Every day, she lost more of her words, and she knew she would never get them back. One by one, her words were slipping away and she would strain to remember them, to call them back to service. But it was all in vain. Time was a thief that knew no mercy, no relent. She knew she could not stop the decline of her mind. So she started her pile of envelopes in a desperate attempt to save what words she still could call upon, before they too were taken from her. Another word remembered, another word uttered as she tried the shape and the feel of it once more, possibly for the last time before it too was gone, another word inscribed upon a small slip of paper, another wax coated envelope to shield the piece of paper and the precious word upon it against the weather and the ravages of time. One by one, her pile grew as her mind emptied of the very words she was trying so hard to preserve. She knew she would lose this war in the end, the words were being taken from her faster than she could write them down, but she was determined to save as much of her precious lexicon as possible before she lost the last of them. The pile had become a mountain, but it was still far too small, and she had so few days left yet to increase its height.
It was as if the words she could not recollect had slipped away from her world, and with the departing of each, that part of her world was no more, that piece of her reality disappearing with the word that described it. Her world was growing smaller even as her pile grew. Soon, there would be nothing left to her but a mountain of envelopes and whatever was left of the world she could seal away inside. Feverishly she labored away, straining against her dying sight and dimming spirit, inscribing yet another of her priceless notes to herself against a day she could no longer forestall, ignoring the contracting walls of her world as she struggled to pluck another fleeing memory back from the looming shadows. Cursing the scant additions of the day, weary of the effort, she turned in. She would try again tomorrow. Perhaps tomorrow she would remember.
