Carefully, I slip the film over my eye. It beeps three times before I repeat the process for the other. I wrap two bands around my wrists, connecting them through a pearlescent wire to the nodes against my scalp, my ears, my nose, a skeleton of want. I select a number projected from the band, take a breath, then another. 

 

My last attempt to find you drained the system, nearly broke it entirely. This time will go better, I think. It will.

 

Grandma, I promise we will meet again.

 

I stumble into a state between my world and your constructed one, a computerized voice calling out instructions. MEMORY LOADING. AWAIT RELOCATION. The lights shift, and the normalcy of my apartment morphs into a series of disgruntled shapes. I slip further into the past, further into you.

 

I enter the rave inside your mind, knowing I’ll see you there.

 

#

 

Imagine, I say that I love you again. I speak with the luster of a supernova ready to burst, as a toddler telling their feelings without second thought. Color it however you like—in the grayscale paintings I’ve always loved, in the lurid abstractions you gravitated toward near the end. It hardly matters. I blink strobes into the darkness, their brightness blinding. The room assembles brick by brick, person by person. Most resemble blurs, unimportant to the simulation. I take a step forward, then again, feeling my way through the crowd as if entering from the periphery of the scene. Only one individual concerns me. 

 

Grandma! I call, my voice a fleck of mismatched paint against the repetitious room.

 

Grandma! I call again. As if responding, the cavernous space trembles, the music a glitch.

 

Don’t announce your presence too loudly, I tell myself. Don’t distort the rendering.

 

I push myself through the moment in search of you. As one melody transitions into another, the crowd shifts. Peering over a shoulder, I spy an expanse of muted color, encircling a body clearer than the rest.

 

It’s you, Grandma. It must be, focused as you are within the moment. Mom always said that you walked with rhythmic sway, that when you danced gravity itself bended to accommodate your motion. 

 

The speakers wail as I narrow the distance between us, traversing across the dented concrete. My shoulders bump against others swaying back and forth. Sorry, I mumble, as if they understand. Excuse me, excuse me. Pillars sprout from the floor, impeding my progress further. I glance around to the pixelated faces left unrendered, their features shifting with each passing second. The strobes quicken their pace, which I attempt to match. Every step brings me closer but never close enough, relegating me to simply a dot in the crowd.

 

I fall for the you before me, young and jubilant, stolen from a better year, a year I could not witness. Tears kiss my cheeks before evaporating into fractals. Sweat envelopes my arms, oddly realistic, a sheen of oil weighing me down. Struggling forward, I scream your name. Once, then twice. As if you could look this way. As if you could exchange a word. As if you would even recognize my face, the features so unlike they were years ago. I break through the simulation, undressing illusion and confusing it for reality. A buzzing blankets the pulsating rhythm, magnifying with each passing second, as I sink beyond sensation.

 

EMOTIONALLY OVERHEATING. MEMORY ENDING. The words slice through my mind like a mantra.

 

No! I say, all breath. No, not again. The words keep repeating. The buzzing grows sickeningly loud. As it plateaus, the rave collapses, industrial walls folded upon themselves, dancers lost within the rubble of time. You, lost within the rubble of what you once experienced. Strobes bleed from monochrome into the feverish fluorescence of a living room light, transitioning back to reality, rendering me an afterimage.

 

#

 

The disc unspools itself from my cornea, buzzing. I detach it completely so that it rests in my palm, blinking red, hardly the size of a nail. Again, I broke the moment with interference. 

 

I learn with every foray that memories are delicate things. The workings of the mind don’t like to be caught, contained, but it was all we could do to remember you beyond sinew and muscle.

 

See, you began to deteriorate quicker than assumed. At first, it was scientific vernacular galore—hippocampus, cortex, amygdala, something about long-term memory encoding and extraction. We pretended to know the meanings, and I watched Mom jot down each to memorize later. Semantic and episodic, procedural and emotional. I was only a child, but even I tested the foreign syllables against my lips, hoping to replicate them as deftly as the doctor.

 

When the medicine reached its limit, we tried the radical. It wasn’t salvation, but something closer to revival. Mom signed a form, then another, waiver after waiver giving a burgeoning company access to your innermost impressions.

 

A month later, we received the most vibrant memories made manifest. We gawked at the intricate system, at the complex instructions, all while your mind unraveled further. By then, I had learned that each scientific word was synonymous with ruin. 

 

#

 

Wrong is embedded into my marrow, transferred from you onto my mother, and perhaps eventually onto me. Time will always find a way to circle, to land me back in a hospital room, in the world of wires and wishes.

 

Mom, I say, the overhead light flicking on at my voice. Remember me?

 

She nods, smiling. I sit on the bed and pull a set of crumpled coloring pages and colored pencils off the bedstand. As I did with Grandma, I give Mom blank sheets for her to somehow convey the ineffable. Lately, I’ve printed scenes from movies she starred in. I rip the papers in half, so I fill in one side and she does the other. The result is a dichotomy, one side perfectly colored within the lines, the other a scattering of shapes.

 

While we work, I hum a melody off-key. Mom tries to replicate it, but it comes out a jumble.

 

That’s wonderful, I say, hardly even a lie.

 

Mom never had an inclination for music as Grandma did but possessed her own talent for acting, neither of which I carry myself. I’ve always loved drawing, so I draw anyplace I can. Every visit here earns nothing besides a growing collection of paper, every piece a marking of disaster. Her capacity for memories shrivels by the day. After the extraction, it seemed to decline at an even faster rate. 

 

At least she doesn’t have to witness her own unraveling. She doesn’t know bodily inadequacy. She doesn’t know the amyloid levels, the dissonant dementia. She stops humming the melody, interrupted by a vast cosmic void.

 

She doesn’t know.

 

#

 

I enter the rave inside your mind, crying tears like fallen stars.

 

Maybe, the cycle continues endlessly. I choose a memory, live it briefly, and return to reality with hopes to chase that high again, surfacing in and out of moments like a technicolored swim. The disc unspools, and I grab it hastily. While the rave remains the repeated nexus between you and I, sometimes I venture beyond. I swing into the gravity of a holiday party, or the aftermath of a vehicular collision, or the funeral of a close friend. I stumble once into the day you discover your pregnancy. That week, I think about nothing else.

 

I visit celebrations, arguments that oscillate between love and hate, philosophical and artistic conversations—anything your brain thought relevant. I even occasionally find myself in some of the later memories. I relive my first birthday, my first word, important events that I’ve misplaced. They increasingly lack coherence, vital pieces, as if observed from afar. By watching myself grow older, I watch you grow frailer. I suppose it’s only lineage, cut in places and branching in others.

 

Now, I watch as Mom’s own roots weaken, wondering if this is what she felt watching the disease consume you.

 

In my head, you are well. I make myself believe it. You are not alive but somehow remain a glistening speck inside the abyss. You carry a survival stretched through spacetime.

#

 

You, drifting inside a pale-white skin.

 

You, a spectrum broken into shards.

 

You, nothing but neurological failure.

 

By the end, I could hardly recognize your face, just as you could hardly remember your own name. In the hospital room, we sat and stared at the irrelevant. I spoke rudimentary words you marveled at, colored disheveled drawings that would fill the hospital window. In one memory, you forget who I am. Even without it, I recall the incident clearly. I looked at you incredulously. When you asked again who I was, I turned to Mom, who turned away. She begged you to repeat each syllable. Don’t you remember? she asked. It’s not so difficult, she said, repeating it to your bewildered eyes. Just try. We smiled as you did, as you tried until a semblance of light returned.

 

Foolish us, knowing it would extinguish just as fast.

 

#

 

Mom, I say. Mom. Her eyes flutter open, relearning the geometry of the hospital room. Remember me?

 

She nods, her gaze imperceptible. I wonder why I even ask. If she didn’t, what could I reasonably do? However many times I wish, I can’t control her body. I bring a small glass of water gingerly to her mouth, dabbing her lips dry afterward. She hardly remembers how to swallow. She hardly remembers the purpose of water. Her body has surrendered itself to total somatic reformation.

 

Back in my apartment rest her memories, a system supposedly better than yours, an experimental run from the same company that reduced the procedure cost. The same technicians from before met me personally, offered condolences and commitments. What I wanted was a cure. So many advancements made every day, yet the body still implodes. I almost didn’t sign the waiver, but I couldn’t bear the consequences. I couldn’t let an entire life dissolve. I simply couldn’t.

 

I kiss Mom tenderly on the cheek as I imagine she once did to you, just as you once did to her and she once did to me. Hanging from the ceiling is a canopy of drawings and colorings. Playing from the screen is a rerun of a television show. Coming through the speakers is a crooning ballad from a bygone era. A convergence of three lives, three loves.

 

I love you, you know? I say. Perhaps she’ll understand eventually, in this space or another.

 

I pretend the three of us dance again, each to our own melody. A pulsing rhythm, a piano chord, eclipsing our broken ends.

 

#

 

Scenes bleed one into the other, their colors mixing like complementary swaths of paint. A laudable recital follows your college graduation, your wedding vows following the day you realize your illness.

 

In one, I observe from the back of an auditorium as you watch the opening night of a production. Mom skips across the stage, and you restrain yourself from clapping. A tear touches the corner of your eye before she even says a word. I find an empty seat, directing my gaze between the woman on stage and the woman in the front row. The plot weaves inconsistently, splinters in your memory, but I hardly care. When Mom shouts the final line, you’re the first to stand and clap, the last to sit. The memory breaks as you approach the stage, tenderness on your tongue.

 

Perhaps ends are another sort of beginning. The curtain shrouds the stage, but the show continues on through others.

 

The first memory I entered was your last. It landed me inevitably in the hospital room, Mom and I circled around your bed. She talked about an acting gig she was considering, whether your worsening condition would force her to decline it.

 

I want to, she said, more to herself than me. But I can’t.

 

Your eyes opened then, a smile cresting your lips. Go, you said. Go into your heart, dear.

 

Just as quickly as you said it, you returned to your hapless state, but the sentiment continued well beyond. It became a source of private inspiration between Mom and I. She would tell it to me as I was growing up, just as I would say it to her.

 

It would be years into my adulthood before I would discover the origin of the phrase. I don’t know what inspired this first foray into your past, what luck brought me these words specifically. Perhaps it was a turbulent dream, a bout of boredom, a found photograph. Perhaps it was nothing that substantial. It was simply a beginning, an end. A branch of life.

 

#

 

Imagine, the strobes dim in a maelstrom, leaving you beneath their spotlight. In this universe, I draw penitently to the black hole. Shock, stupor, something like a doctor saying your brain would soon be stardust, something like you asking when you’d finally die, something like a biochemical technology startup illuminating the detritus that still remained.

 

I’ll get through this, I think. I’ll remember you again. I’ll remember even if it takes unraveling who I thought you were, who I wanted you to be.

 

I enter the rave inside your mind, shedding the world behind me like a past life.

 

Yet, a singular desire lingers. I can feel it tapping against my marrow, even with the pulse wrapping itself around me. I trace the beating of your heart, one body connected to another, as it directs me.

 

Ahead, a flicker of light cleaves the monochrome. The shade is you, I know. You wind through inebriated strangers, and I do little but follow after you, finally finding my way forward. I do not run but approach as though you were asleep, unprepared to wake. How easily I could stop here, discard these memories, convince myself of an alternate dimension, pretend our galaxies lie so far apart that not even light-years connect us. 

 

But I cannot. I cannot because I remember the first time Mom surfaced into a memory, into the rave. It collapsed inside her head, and her body repeated the motion. I remember her screaming, her wailing, me clawing against her skin to disconnect the wires. How after, she relegated the memories to the back of a storage bin, pretending they never existed.

 

I remember because I understand what it means to not, to watch memories fracture into oblivion.

 

Amidst the meteor belt that is the dance floor, I run into your arms. EMOTIONALLY OVERHEATING. I pinch a lump of cheek, traversing your unwrinkled skin with care, finding what I never had the opportunity to know. MEMORY ENDING. Even as the world buzzes, I cling tight to you, whom I loved and love and will forever love.

 

MEMORY—

 

I tell you my name and we begin anew.