She didn’t notice when it first started to happen. When their eyes began to drift from her, as if there were nothing left in her to catch and hold them. Perhaps she had begun to drift as well.

She only realized something was deeply, perhaps irrevocably, wrong when someone she knew well enough to share stories and laughter with looked at her and asked, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

And by then it was everywhere. By then it was all of them, everyone she spoke to, trying to remember as if her name was just on the tip of their tongue. If she urged, begged them to remember, they recoiled as they would from any stranger making too-desperate demands.

But she needed them to remember. Needed at least one of them to look at her with clear, certain eyes and say her name, because she had realized too late that it was a hollow, half-lost shape on the tip of her tongue, too.