The lake is always still and quiet when I visit.
And I seem to visit whenever I rest my head on my pillow, when the world is dark and silent and only the crickets dare to shatter it. There are no crickets near the lake, no owls or predatory cats or monstrous creatures lurking in the shadows. There is only the water: cool, calm, a kind of blue that I've never seen in my waking life before, but I somehow know, intimately. Instinctively.
I wish I knew the hex code of such a blue. People would pay millions to paint their walls in such a tranquil color.
Whenever I arrive at the lake, I normally sit on its banks, dipping my toes into the water. It's never too cold for me. If anything, it's always the perfect temperature, refreshing in a way I hadn't known I needed until my ankles are in and I'm sighing as the tension sluices out of me.
I sigh because the lake makes me reflect on...well, everything.
Why this dream?
Why these feelings?
And, moreover, why me? I'm nobody...
It's amusing because I've been told that feeling as if I am nobody is a trauma loop that I need to overcome. After all, I must mean something to somebody, right? That's what I'm told, at least.
I just wish I knew who that somebody was. Or maybe even what. It could be a thing that cares for me deeper than I care for myself, right? It doesn't have to be a person.
Maybe it's a dog...
What would it be like to have decades upon decades with someone she cared about like family, erased overnight? How would she feel when she looked upon a face that should have been familiar, but wasn’t?
Would her smile still be strained? Would she still reach for a hug, even though the person would seem like a stranger instead of a friend? Would she decline family events—birthday parties and celebration dinners because she just didn’t know these people anymore who kept calling her phone?
The ache of never being able to forget shadowed her slow walk home, making her steps drag and her breath sigh heavily out from between her lips.
Her winding path led her past her grandmother’s favorite park. The hedges were overgrown now, and there were more weeds than flowers in the stylized gardens.
The door to the front of the flower shop opens with a small chime, and Sumi glances up from her notebook to the weathered features of her grandmother’s best friend shuffling into the store. The golden glow from the setting sun follows her in as her steps whisper across the linoleum and up to the counter.
Sumi closes her notebook and gently shoves it out of the way, the smile that stretches her face polite, but pained at the same time. There were memories tied to this woman, memories that she was still grieving and sorting through as she struggled with the loss of her grandmother.
“Good evening Mrs. Crutcher,” Sumi greeted politely, making the elderly woman smile. The deep lines in her wrinkled skin relaxed, and her misty blue eyes glanced from behind Sumi to her face, as if suddenly realizing that she was being spoken to.
“Sumi, my dear!” she greeted in a husky voice tinted with age. It made Sumi remember the hushed tones that she and her grandmother would use at the dining room table, talking about gossip that was decades old.
A painful fissure of loneliness made her heart ache.
“Did your mom finally move in okay?” Mrs. Crutcher inquired while placing her tan purse on the counter, her gnarled hands dipping inside to pull out her wallet. “I haven’t seen her around recently.”
And for a moment, it felt like someone had stomped on her chest.
Sumi’s breath catches, the tears prick the backs of her eyes, and her throat clenches tight. The memory surges forth like a tidal wave: walking into her mom’s room — her grandmother’s old bedroom — and finding her unresponsive.
The paramedics had done everything they could, but she was gone long before Sumi picked up the phone to call for help.
She swallowed and took a fortifying breath before answering. “She… she passed, Mrs. Crutcher. A little over a month ago. Do you… not remember the funeral?”
And even if Mrs. Adaline Crutcher didn’t, Sumi did. She would always remember how bright the sun shone, how there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the heat was tempered with a cool breeze. But the tears had stuck to her cheeks, her pantyhose had been itchy against her slender thighs, and she was the last person to leave the gravesite when the services were over.
It had always been her, her mom, and her grandmother against the world, and now, she was left alone with only their memories for comfort.
Memories and flowers.
Mrs. Crutcher placed her wallet down gently atop the counter, her shoulders falling. Her smile melted like candlewax.
“Oh dear,” she whispered with a solemn shake of her head. “I…It’s not that I forgot, Sumi. The doctors think…I’ve got Alzheimer’s.” She winced as she said it, the burden making her shoulders curl inward, protectively.
Sumi reached out a hand and laid it gently atop her arthritic-riddled one, the texture of her skin immediately bringing her grandmother to mind. She shoved down the emotion welling in her throat and gave Mrs. Crutcher a benevolent smile. “You’re here to get Mr. Crutcher his birthday flowers, right? His birthday was two weeks ago, Mrs. Crutcher.”
Tears began to well in her eyes, and Sumi swallowed the stone bobbing in her throat.
Funny — she remembered everything, while Mrs. Crutcher couldn’t remember at all. She couldn’t help but wonder if her life would have been easier if she were without her pristine memory. If her mother, her grandmother, old friends, and old flames alike were mere ghosts drifting through her mind, not blood and flesh reminders of their current absence in her life.
She wondered if forgetting might be mercy.
She had…no one.
“Let me call David to come pick you up, okay? We close in fifteen minutes anyway.”
And by the time she got Mrs. Crutcher squared away with her son, the sun had set, which meant her family’s flower shop was closed for the day.
She closed and locked the shop door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and paused. Just for a moment.
The weight of today’s meeting held her heart hostage.
Sumi caught sight of her grandmother’s favorite gazebo, the once pristine monument now bedraggled with age, the paint chipping, the tables and chairs within missing.
There was nowhere to play checkers anymore…and no one to play them with.
She caught the tears before they could slide fully down her cheeks, her gaze forced forward, her steps a little quicker than before. Home wasn’t really home anymore, especially not without them, but it beat the chill that came in with the moon, the crescent shape hanging low in the sky.
The hill sloped gently upward, and as she reached the crest, the old house came into view. The home had stood here for generations, her family’s legacy etched into every beam and brick. A wide porch hugged the front, its wooden posts weathered and slightly crooked, tangled with the last clinging vines of summer.
It was supposed to pass to her only after her mother’s death — an event meant for some far‑off future, not six months after they laid her grandmother to rest.
The scent of old wood, rose oil, and faint lavender greeted her as she stepped over the threshold and into the house. She flicked on the lights as she moved from the front parlor to the kitchen, her mind focusing on putting one foot in front of the other instead of the silence that greeted her.
Entering the kitchen, she turned on the radio before yanking open the fridge, her eyes scanning the shelves for something simple she could reheat.
The radio crackled to life as it always did, and at first, it was just static—then a piano chord sliced through the silence. The melody unfolded like a dream, and Sumi felt every muscle in her body freeze. She stood up and stared at the radio as the tears flowed from her eyes freely. There was nothing she could do to stop them.
It was their song.
The one they always sang in the kitchen on Sunday mornings—her mom stirring pancake batter, her grandmother humming in time as she trimmed roses from the garden. They would belt out the chorus off-key, but the joy behind their shared song, and the laughter when it was done—she’d never forget it for as long as she lived.
She chuckled, a sound that caught her off guard. She couldn’t remember the last time she laughed. And then her eyes fluttered closed and her lips found the familiar rhythm of the song. She hummed the tune as she bumped the refrigerator door closed and swayed in time to the music in the center of her family’s kitchen.
This memory filled her, soothing the hollow places that had lived inside her for longer than she was comfortable examining. It reminded her that even if she was alone in this big house, she had never been unloved. And there, behind her eyelids, tears shimmering on her long lashes, she could so clearly remember her grandmother’s loving smile and her mother’s warm embrace.
Maybe memory wasn’t a burden at all.
Maybe it was a gift.