Full Circle

Tamara Soltykevych

As I watch my baby learn his world
My grandmother is forgetting hers
While he learns to hold a spoon
She forgets to feed herself
As he starts to crawl to his toys
She wanders off in the night
I find him with a leg stuck under the furniture
While she gets lost and is found by strangers

Soon I’ll explain things to my son
Like why is the sky blue
(do I know?)
but her world is inexplicable

Soon she might not know who I am
Or who her son is

Dementia runs in my family
Like thick invisible blood

The thought of one day forgetting my son
Of the existence of him being wiped clean
Is an awful, dizzying thing
It’s a world I don’t want to exist in

One day I’ll give him this book of poems
Poems I wrote for him, because of him
Not only so he’ll always know how much I love him
(In case I forget to tell him)

But also, so that maybe
Maybe one day he’ll read them to me
And maybe
I’ll remember

My blue-eyed boy
That I brought into this world
A lifetime ago

Tamara Soltykevych is a poetry and fiction writer based in Edmonton, Canada. She recently graduated from the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing Certificate Program and is currently working on a series of poems and her first novel. Her inspiration comes from real people’s real stories, and from the two loves of her life, her husband and son.