The names go first. Then the years. Then the faces of people she knows she should know.
But the songs stay.
That is the thing that surprised me the most about this, the songs. The music is in a different part of the architecture, in something older and more insulated than the naming and the dating and the sequential placing of events on a timeline. The songs are in the body the way the body knows the songs, the way you know a song you have not thought about in forty years and have it come back complete, every word, every turn of melody, the way the chorus rises and the way the bridge resolves, all of it intact in a place that the fog cannot seem to reach.
I put on her music last Sunday.
The music she would have known at twenty, at thirty, the music that belongs to the decades before I existed, that is the soundtrack of a life I only know through her telling of it, through the photographs and the fragments she has given me over the years. I put it on and she went somewhere. Not away. Somewhere inside. Her eyes changed, the way eyes change when recognition arrives in a register deeper than the mind, when the body knows before the mind catches up.
She started singing.
Not performing. Not self-consciously. Just the song coming out of her the way songs come out of a person who is fully inside the song, not remembering the words but inhabiting them, the way you inhabit a thing that is stored somewhere more durable than memory. She sang the whole of it. Every word in place. The voice not what it was at twenty but still hers, still carrying the specific quality of her voice that is hers the way her laugh is hers, that I would know anywhere.
I did not speak. I did not want to interrupt the territory she was in.
When the song ended she looked at me and said: I used to know all the words to that one.
I said: you still do.
She looked uncertain. I let her look uncertain. Some things are better felt than argued. She still knew the words. I heard them. They were all there. Whatever is left, the songs are there.
