#5

The truth was, focusing on these memories was as much a way to hold onto her history as it was a distraction.  She needed something to think about, to imagine, to draw her attention away from what always lay just out of sight, in the corner of her peripheral vision.  She could not turn her head to look directly at it, even if she had wanted to.  It sat there, out of focus and barely visible at the edges of her vision.  Maddening.  Reminding her where she was.

#4

She would spend as long as she could, poring over every detail of that memory.  The bite of the frozen air at the back of her throat.  The crush of ice under her boots.  Her grandmother's wrinkled skin, her hand holding on tight to Alice's as they walked down the front steps.  Alice had never imagined how many senses, how many atoms of memory could be packed into one moment, never imagined the density of history until she began to lose hers.

#3

There were, of course, a few things that Alice knew she would not forget.  The quiet hum of the lights, muffled but not silenced by the glass.  The white ceiling above her.  The slight cold, not a chill or a freeze, but enough to make the tips of her toes sing.  She would use this, the cold and the white, to hold onto other memories.  She could still remember snow.  She could still remember walking outside her grandmother's house at seven years old and breathing the winter air in deep into her lungs.

#2

Sometimes, she would try and pass the time by counting all the things she had forgotten.  By her rough count, it had been three weeks since the smell of freshly-brewed coffee had slipped away.  Two months since the last sound of a trumpet solo drifted away, twice that long since she could no longer picture her mother's eyes.  It was around the time that Alice realized she had long since forgotten how long three weeks or two months felt like that the list became depressing and futile.

#1

Reluctantly, Alice admitted to herself that she had forgotten how it felt to hold a clump of soil in her hand.  It had been slowly slipping away for days by that point, and the harder she worked to freeze the feeling in her mind, the more it faded.  She would have rubbed her fingertips together to jog her memory, to remind her senses of the feeling of digging into the earth and letting the summer dirt move between her fingers, if she could have moved them at all.  Alice stared ahead.