I am afraid of what my mind will be like without my memories. Will it be eternal blankness, a liminal focus on what is in front of me? Eventually, I won’t recognize or remember Torou. One day, maybe even Monica. A strange ordering, perhaps, but I am sure you or Monica will be the last person I remember. You were such a fixture of my childhood. The old memories, I’ve read, are the slowest to fade. And Monica because she is my life. If I forget her, then it is no longer me remembering. Merely the dregs left over, keeping my body moving.

But today is a good day. My mind feels sharp, Monica is home, and she brought me my favorite sandwich. The weather is lovely, and there is soup on the stove.

Now that I am a grandmother, I understand my own grandmother more than I ever thought I would. I’ve never told Monica about Reforging, or even much about you. Yet back then, I thought it the height of cruelty that my grandmother would not let me learn whatever secret there was to the pencils. I thought she purposefully isolated me.

Though we all lived in the same complex, I barely saw her. She remained confined to her room, or if the weather was nice, she ventured into the garden to meditate. She could not move much farther than that by herself because of the pain in her feet, part of the last generation of women in our family who had their feet bound, broken, and rebroken since a young age.

If I had been a good granddaughter, I would have spent more time with her in her room. Especially in those months after my father left, when she clearly missed him. But I hated the smell of the smoke and the chance she would ask me to help load her pipe.

She was also obsessed with reading the news, always looking for hints of wherever my father might be, the danger he could be in. You had already been living with us for two years by then. You were the more considerate one, but she only ever called me in to read her news. I was thirteen and impatient to be away from her.

“Another British newspaper office bombed,” she’d say for what felt like the fifth time in a matter of months. At first, I thought she was happy about it. She had no love for the foreigners, complained about how they spent all their time in Shanghai gambling and throwing parties, brawling in barrooms. But when the Japanese continued their bombing, targeting American and French newspaper offices as well, her tone changed.

“They won’t know what is happening to us here,” she said solemnly.