The Soft Hum of Forgetting

Edna lifted the pencil, its weight suddenly immense, as if it carried every year she could no longer name. The page before her—once her refuge, once the doorway to entire worlds—had become a pale, unreachable shore. She blinked, and for a heartbeat she thought she saw lines there: the curve of Henry’s jaw, the gentle droop of his tired smile, the way his hair fell when he laughed. But the moment she tried to focus, the lines dissolved, slipping away like mist touched by sunlight.

Her hand trembled.

She drew a single line down the center of the page. It wavered, unsure. She tried again—a curve, maybe the start of Henry’s shoulder, or maybe the shape of the diner booth where he used to sit across from her. But the graphite faltered, skidding to a stop. It wasn’t right. None of it was. The memories she reached for felt like they had been photocopied too many times—blurry, smudged, lacking their old warmth.

She pressed her palm flat against the paper, desperate to anchor something—anything. The texture was familiar. Smooth. Real. She whispered Henry’s name, hoping the sound alone might summon him, might reach into the fog curling around her mind and pull forward something solid.

Nothing came.

But somewhere in the blankness, an image flickered—Henry at the diner, his fingers wrapped around a glass, the way he had smiled at her that night that never happened. Or had it? She couldn’t trust her own mind anymore. Memories folded over each other like thin, brittle pages of an old book. Some were true; some were dreams; some were inventions crafted by her lonely, drifting brain.

She tried to sketch the spider she’d seen earlier—the one crawling from her drink in the dream—but even that slipped away. The page absorbed her attempts and turned them into nothingness, swallowing her pencil strokes like a thirsty desert swallowing rain.

Edna exhaled shakily.

“I used to know how to do this,” she murmured to the empty room, unsure whether she was speaking to herself, to Henry, or to the fading part of her mind that still remembered being whole.

She lifted the pencil again, pressuring herself to draw something—a door, a line, a memory. Instead, the white expanse before her seemed to grow, stretching outward, an endless blank horizon. A mirror of her thoughts, of the quiet erasure happening inside her.

Edna closed her eyes.

In the darkness behind her eyelids, she hoped to find color. Or Henry. Or the diner. But all she found was the soft hum of forgetting, a lullaby she could no longer resist.