Outside, it is not dark but not bright, either, which means, in Alaska, that it’s either morning or afternoon and not the dead of winter, when the light never brightens enough to be called day. I check my phone for the time. Bingo. Afternoon. I sit back in my swivel chair and survey my desk. From the looks of it, I was in the middle of recording the earlier part of my day and planning for the rest of it. My forehead wrinkles and I make a note of what I was doing inside the notebook that lies open on the desk. Something sticks out of my sweatshirt pocket, but when I reach for it, a sensation that stops my hand overwhelms me. I swallow past a stubborn lump and instead turn back to the work at hand. My notes.

Third fact (and one that doesn’t surprise me): I am well known in my small Alaskan town. Not for any particular accomplishment or feat of strength or intellectual achievements, unless you count the sock thing. I am the woman with no short-term memory from the fourteenth floor. And I know this because it’s written in my notebook, just above a bulleted list of To Do items I intend to complete this afternoon. Fortunately for me, the event that took my memory didn’t affect my exceptional organizational skills, which helped me sail through undergrad and grad school and now, today, allow me to structure my day with confidence even when I find myself staring at my hands for no reason. I know this because it’s all in my notes, and because it’s a skill I’ve honed since I was a little girl, when my mother couldn’t leave her bedroom for weeks on end, and it was garbage day or laundry day or any day where something needed to get done.

But I’m not going to think about my mother right now, because those thoughts take me down a rabbit hole where sadness sticks to the walls in hardened globs of old gum that break my fingernails when I try to scrape them off. Instead, I turn my thoughts to Dad, and already I’m breathing easier.