The Art of Forgetting

The vitamin bottle sat on her nightstand, a orange plastic pillar of morning ritual. Forty years old, and suddenly her body required maintenance like an old car. Elena dry-swallowed the D3 tablet, thinking how Marcus used to remind her, his voice gentle against her ear, "Don't forget your vitamins, El." Three years since the divorce, and still she reached for his ghost in the smallest rituals.

At the office, her colleague David's baseball collection lined his cubicle wall — signed balls from games he'd never attended, nostalgic for an era before his birth. "My dad's," he'd explain, but Elena saw the hunger in his eyes.

"Wanna grab drinks after work?" David asked, leaning against her desk. His bear tattoo peeked from his rolled sleeve — a juvenile mistake from college he'd laugh about now, though something about its dead, button eyes made her chest tighten.

She thought about saying yes. David was kind. Safe. The kind of man who'd remember her birthday and never forget to ask how her day was. But her mind flashed to Marcus, standing in their kitchen twelve years ago, holding the positive pregnancy test they'd both wanted so desperately. The baseball game they'd watched that night, drunk on possibility, naming their imaginary child between innings. Then the miscarriage, silent and devastating, and how Marcus had held her as she wept, both of them broken in different ways.

The way he'd started forgetting things afterward. First small things — keys, appointments. Then names. Faces. The bear he'd won her at a carnival, twenty years old and falling apart, became his anchor when nothing else made sense. Early-onset Alzheimer's at forty-two. The irony of it still made her want to scream.

"Elena?" David's voice pulled her back. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead.

She looked at the vitamin bottle in her drawer. At David's kind, expectant face. At the baseball on his desk, signed by a player who'd probably been dead for years.

"I can't," she said. "I have somewhere I need to be."

She drove to the facility instead, the urn with Marcus's ashes on the passenger seat. The bear — stupid, ratty, beloved — sat beside it. Somewhere, a baseball game played on the radio, and for the first time in three years, she turned the volume up and let herself remember.