One Last Time

It was the last trip Alisha would take.

For the past few months, words like 'irreversible', 'degenerative', 'progressive', and 'mental health' have made it to the most commonly used word list. She first noticed the desync when her vowels started missing occasionally in her texts; common nouns followed, then the recipes. Streets turned in a different direction, and some faces no longer felt familiar.

Alisha, by now, had started to keep a notebook, with her name, address, blood group, Alzheimer's medicine list, and her birthday on the first page. The cover boldly read: Alisha, in case you forget your own name. The inside page read, Enrique, my love. Last hug in Javari. Two years ago, Alisha and Enrique had travelled to Brazil on a post-retirement adventure trip. It had been in the planning for fifteen years. Enrique would always say, "This would be the trip of a lifetime." Little did they know, this would be their last.

(Vale do) Javari, in Brazil, was not a place people would choose. Wild, remote, dense jungles, disconnected, stuck in a different time. A place where hunters outnumbered humans by a large margin. But the two were in love. They always were, and hardly needed anyone else for company. Enrique had made and broken promises for years, but deep inside, Alisha knew they would one day travel to Javari. So they did. Three days into the trip, the couple had forgotten their physical age and were enjoying every bit of it.

Alisha felt a sudden movement around her but kept canoeing. Animals, birds, even swarms of insects seemed to be in a hurry. Enrique chuckled as usual, ' A dinosaur might have come back from the dead.' Before they could finish the joke, a storm swallowed their boat. The sky turned dark. Alisha tried to scream when she felt the boat breaking. Enrique tried to grab onto a bent tree nearby, but the swollen river hurled the boat down a large waterfall. Later, the sky turned to its slow self as if nothing had happened. Alisha opened her eyes and felt in pain. Her arms and legs were ribboned with cuts. She looked around and realised she was in a hospital, back in her hometown. Enrique never made it.

Alisha felt broken, with her heart cleaved in half. Days later, she returned home. Her grief had blurred into confusion, and confusion fogged memory. There was no grave to visit, just silence buried under broken memories of that fateful day. And then the diagnosis. The shock had messed up her inner wiring with no known way to fix it. One morning, Alisha woke up with a sharp pain. It was not her usual headache. Her palpitations had arisen not from agitation but from a strong urge to return. She had visions of their light brown canoe and the birds that she saw flocking towards the west. A lady who could barely recall her last meal had visions from Javari. Doctors said hallucinations might occur, but this felt different. She could vividly recollect the scent of wet earth, the way the trees raced toward the sun, and Enrique saying, 'If you ever get lost, look for the light.'

Alisha hurried back to her room. She remembered Enrique had planned it in his office diary when he was trying to impress her with his planning skills. In haste, she forgot to switch the lights on and kept searching with the curtains still drawn. Three hours of persistence paid off as she found a worn-out diary still lying in the bottom drawer. The next day, Alisha called her doctor, her cousins, and her friends to bid them farewell before leaving for Javari. None of them believed she could make it, but none had the heart to say no either. Alisha then carefully packed her backpack. The charm hanging by the zippers still smelled of exotic lavender. Enrique's diary helped a bit, too. He had made a list of essentials for their trip. The problem was that Alisha didn't know where most of those things were kept. She picked whatever she could remember and left.

Sixteen hours later, the rickety propeller plane Alisha boarded announced its descent toward the edge of Javari. The jungle looked like an endless crochet. Alisha had put on a brave face but was trembling within. 'What if I didn't make it out of here? Also, what if I don't find him?' She opened her diary and turned to the timetable page, only to realise she had forgotten her wristwatch. She then quickly gulped two tablets with water. As she drank water from her bottle, she saw the same flock of birds flying above. 'Oh, Lord, is there a storm coming?'

Her pulse quickened. A clammy sweat broke out on her forehead. She started looking around for signs, but had forgotten her exact coordinates. She then saw a little tapeti peacefully nibbling on a vegetable stalk, which calmed her down. She said to herself, 'Alisha, you have lived with problems for a long time. Let's try to live without them for a while.' The days that followed bent time. Javari was no place for forgetfulness. The hostile environment was built for the strongest to survive. But Alisha had somehow mustered the courage to walk through the dense canopies of trees. She would note everything she saw: left at the fork with the river on the right, pink butterflies meaning water is near, and not to touch anything, even when it sparkles.

Surviving on beans, fruits, and large bags of crisps, Alisha was learning the jungle way. Luckily, she had not seen a wild animal, or she might have forgotten about it. There were times when she forgot where she was. Scream was her best friend. She would scream into the void, one to vent out, the other to pick up animal or bird sounds. Her vocals had turned raspy by now. Alisha would sometimes think to herself, 'What would I be doing if I were not here?' Her diary told her about her home, her friends, and her cousins to avoid. She would laugh reading about them, but felt sad the next moment, not being able to recollect how they looked.

About 7 days into the expedition, Alisha was bruised, battered, scared, and confused. She had experienced a nasty fall, a sudden bout of fever, and a near-fatal bee sting. But whenever her mind flickered, her heart always pointed forward. At one point, she reached for her diary but realised she had forgotten it somewhere. That diary was the only connection between her and the outside world. Alisha felt broken. She had forgotten why she was here and where she was heading. All she could recollect was that she was looking for her husband, 'Henry K.' Alisha repeated the name a couple of times. The name sounded correct. By now, Alisha's preoccupied mind had moved beyond spellings and was surviving only on sounds. She was somehow surviving against Javari, wandering by the day and staring into the void at night before falling asleep. She would occasionally have random visuals from the past playing in her mind, with Enrique (now Henry K) mimicking a bear or enacting a dinosaur. But they were short-lived and vanished at first light.

The next morning, Alisha woke to the sounds of howler monkeys. At first, she could not understand what was happening. As she looked up, a family of monkeys was passing through the branches. She quickly hid herself behind a large tree trunk. No storm was approaching. But Alisha saw something unusual. A human-like creature was sitting near the giant Samauma tree. It was thin as driftwood, with a bent spine, scarred body, clouded eyes, and overgrown hair that covered its face. But it didn't seem to be a monkey, especially with a wooden staff resting across its knees. Something inside her quieted. She moved closer. Back in the city, she would have shrugged at a stranger. But this was the first human-like creature that she had seen in days. Alisha got up, slowly, steadily, and cautiously. She picked a rock in one hand and a stick in another as she walked towards him. The creature was busy eating the fruits dropped by the passing howler monkeys.

"Excuse me, my name is ..." She couldn't remember her name. He was shocked and quickly jumped for cover. She realised it was not an animal but a human. The man tilted his head in the direction he sensed her voice. She realised he was blind, but something was exchanged between them, in silence. Alisha could feel it inside. In tense situations, her heart would be racing, but she was feeling peaceful. On the other hand, the man was restless. He heard a human voice after so long that he had forgotten he was a human too. Plus, the voice, although hoarse, sounded vaguely familiar. Alisha said, "I am sorry, have you seen a man named Eric around?" She was trying hard to remember his name and how he looked but couldn't describe his features. "He looks like - you." He reluctantly nodded in disapproval and began walking away with the help of his staff. Alisha felt dejected and turned away, too. By now, she had forgotten her own name, his personality, her diary, his name, and her way out. She began walking, took a few steps, and paused. 'He nodded a no, which means he understood my language.' She quickly turned to see the crooked-spined walking through the haze.

She shouted, "Excuse me, if you see Jerry, can you give this to him?" She removed the charm from her backpack's zipper and whirled it towards him. It was a plastic bottle with lavender inside. The words FOLLOW THE LIGHT were printed on it. The charm fell nearby. The man could sense it hitting the leafy floor, but didn't know exactly where it landed. Alisha realised it and walked towards him to help him search. She picked the charm, and he picked the scent of lavender.

The Javari now narrates the story of an old couple living deep in the woods who met in the most unusual circumstances. That day, Javari saw their foreheads lean in no words, no memory, no vision. Just nearness and a distant echo of who they were, vibrating quietly between them. They have been together since, in the most unusual way. She forgets where she is every morning. He wakes before dawn just to guide her back to her own self. They don't speak much, but when they do, it is usually through silence. The kind of silence that comes only when love has outlived memory and become something deeper. Javari says they had found their diary with pages swollen from rain. But they threw it in the river, the one that had brought Enrique, who now goes by the name Jerry (or whatever she calls him by), ashore after the storm. She didn't remember it was hers. And he didn't want her to.