Everything takes longer than you think, except life. My daughter and I have matching crow’s feet after only thirty-six years. We both have mysterious knuckle calluses that Western medicine chalks up to aging. We started getting stiff and sore from sleep at forty-two; we both thought it was too soon. I thought I passed down a strong memory from a long line of eidetic ones, but I started to notice about five years ago, when Arrow was not yet seventy, that I had not. We both thought it was too soon until, in no time at all, she had forgotten the concept of time.

If you’ll please excuse me, Arrow needs her medicines.

The way the spring-morning sun glints on the power lines turns them into spider threads webbing the houses of our neighborhood together. It’s new to me how none of the houses match—although I was a child of the revolution and should fancy that sort of thing, I eventually settled, as most white women did upon marriage, into well-manicured suburbia—but I decided it would be more prudent for things to be new to me than to Arrow. So I moved into that powder-blue rambler she and Bob had picked out after over a year of excruciating searching and offering and had shared with their four boys. We’d both lost husbands: mine too soon; hers “not so much,” as she had started repeating lately. Of all the bizarre utterances her vocal cords seemed to independently produce, this surprised me the most. A fiery automobile crash took her love and all four of their sons before he was fifty—how could this not be too soon? But then, my definition of dying too soon was before me.

The power lines glinted the entire morning of our first power outage, six months after I moved in with her. Arrow began pacing the house when her computer wouldn’t start up, hands interlocked and shaking, whispering, “Mercy, I hope they find that poor lost server soon. Her mother must be worried sick,” in between attempts to restart her machine.

Of course this saddened me. I haven’t a clue how to respond to a computer screen that tells me the server cannot be located, which may be my age; but thinking machines have mothers is not age-related. Sixty-one years of marriage to a computer programmer gave me reason to suspect the belief that machines have mothers isn’t related to dementia, either. But I could be wrong: the further down the dementia road you go with your loved one, the harder it is to see what’s behind you if you ever dare turn around.

At the same time, one thing that has annoyed me for almost ninety-five years: why are women’s stories so unrelentingly sad? Arrow and I decided, about the time I moved in, that we were going to find humor everywhere we possibly could. This was more of a struggle for her than she anticipated, and it frustrates me still that this, struggle, is how I took to measuring her proximity to herself through the process. It wasn’t just the damage one can do to someone, to an entire group, to use struggle as a focal point for identity—it was that struggle is a poor proxy for it.

On one of our dusk walks, I shuffled with Arrow through downtown La Conner, WA, which was still as quaint as it was when it was established in 1869. She pointed at a carved toy train in the window display of the woodworking shop and shouted, “Stretch rumble!” Her glee was that of a child. She instantly heated up with shame and stuffed her hands back into her pockets; I had to suppress my delight at seeing Young Arrow again and say, smoothly as I could, “We don’t really leave behind all the selves we once were. It’s more that we collect them along the way.”

“Oh, Mom,” Arrow said, “you and your antique collecting.” An intentional joke! A purposeful tease! Be still, my heart.

Please excuse me; it’s time for Arrow’s medicines. Be still, my hands.

I awoke in the night to irregular thudding striving for pattern. The grunt of a table against the original hardwood in the dining room. The front door latching and unlatching. The reek of burning coffee. Fingernails clacking on the wood paneling.

Did I forget Arrow’s medicines?

Arrow and I talked about dreams for the house we share now. Though it felt like planting seeds after you’ve received word to evacuate for two women past seventy-five to discuss dreaming, it also felt gloriously transgressive. I poured tea from my mother’s ceramic pot, which Arrow played make-believe with her whole childhood and never broke.

I wanted wisteria. I wanted it to graze our grayed heads as we came and went. She wanted a bright orange trellis to hang the wisteria on. I wanted a doorframe in which I could put a notch where the top of her head reached every time she asked to be measured. She wanted some humongous sectional that stuck in her mind during a commercial break, I’m guessing, but the way she’s describing it, I can’t imagine it fitting in our great room. She insists it will. I don’t want to fragilize her, not yet, so I insist the opposite. She keeps talking about monuments, and it takes me far too long to realize that she means “measurements” because, by the time I think to look for…what it is called…”Gumby’s ruler” is the only thing that comes to mind, she is sobbing her head off. I’ve forgotten what I’m looking for, I’ve forgotten how I used to soothe my child. All I can think is Arrow needs her medicines.

I don’t know how many hours later, Arrow is poking at the computer screen like she did with fishbowls seventy years ago. It is actually time for Arrow’s medicines, I believe. But she will not take them. This is the first time she will not take them. She will not take them until we find the server. All I can find are the words I was looking for earlier: tape measure.

Megan Wildhood is a neurodiverse lady writer in Seattle who helps her readers feel genuinely seen as they interact with her dispatches from the junction of extractive economics, mental and emotional distress, disability and reparative justice. She hopes you will find yourself in her words as they appear in her poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017) as well as The Atlantic, Yes! Magazine, Mad in America, The Sun, and elsewhere. You can learn more at meganwildhood.com.

Photo: different beauties by Alan Bern