Collateral

Ali Darwiche

Before me sits a woman

with a lifetime folded somewhere inside her.

There are years within her

that I will never know—

kitchens warmed by voices,

hands that held children,

names she once carried easily

on the surface of her tongue.

But now the new days slip through her hands.

Some memories remain.

Some loosen.

Some leave quietly.

I speak to her son on the phone,

and his voice carries what hers cannot.

He tells me how quickly she has changed,

how the woman who once remembered for everyone

now needs others to remember for her.

In medicine, we call this collateral:

the history gathered beside the patient,

the story medicine asks for

when the mind can no longer give it whole.

But as I listen,

I begin to wonder

who will one day speak for me.

Where will I be

when time begins to take inventory

of what I can still hold?

Will I remember the olive trees in Lebanon,

their silver leaves turning in the sun,

their branches rooted in a soil

that feels older than language?

Will I remember the taste of home,

the way one place can live inside you

even after you have crossed oceans?

Will I remember Zaytoon,

my cat named after that olive,

a small reminder of where I come from?

And will there come a day

when familiar faces approach me

as strangers?

If that day comes,

I pray I have people beside me

who do not mistake my forgetting

for emptiness.

I pray they bring photographs.

I pray they tell me stories.

I pray they say,

Here you are, running beneath the olive trees.

Here you are, laughing with us.

Here you are, holding Zaytoon close.

Here you are, standing beside a patient,

learning that medicine is not only

the study of what fails in the body,

but the practice of protecting

what remains of a person.

Here you are, listening and serving.

Here you are, dear.

And I pray I am kind to them.

I pray that even if my memories are damaged,

my tenderness is not.

Maybe this is what collateral really means:

not merely a history taken from someone else,

not merely a son’s voice over the phone,

not merely the facts written down

when the patient cannot testify alone.

Maybe collateral is what remains

when memory becomes too fragile

to carry a life by itself.

The people who love us

become the keepers of our remembering.

So perhaps this is what we should strive for:

to live a life worth holding,

worth retelling,

worth protecting in the minds of others—

so that even if one day

we cannot find ourselves,

someone who loves us

can still point gently and say,

There you are, dear.