One Day, Fade Away

One day, he knows he’s going to look up into someone’s face and realize that he no longer can recognize them at all. What used to be a carefully curated catalog of recognizing hair styles and clothing and eye colors falls onto the floor and scattered into disarray. The pages falling out of the folder, with the carefully determined order now spread haphazardly across the floor.

One of these days, he’s going to try to eat something, and find that what strikes him most is not the taste but the texture, the flavors themselves near indistinguishable, all running together into a pale blur, where it had once been a vibrant symphony.

But those days are far from here, those days when what he knows to be true begins to fade are far in the distance, at least he hopes they will be. One of these days, and maybe it’s already passed, someone is going to refer to him by his name, by words that he has used his whole life, and instead of the normality that comes with acknowledgement they’ll feel the stirring sting of lack of recognition.

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