2026 Memory Contest Creative Nonfiction Runner-Up
I am holding my mother’s hand as we walk towards the Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, past the fish market and the Barnes and Noble where, if I am lucky, I can convince her to buy a hot chocolate from the Starbucks inside. It is winter, and the sky is a blanket of navy. Light spills out from the hospital. Ambulances idle on the curb.
Inside, we wait for an EEG, a test to measure the electrical activity of my brain. In the waiting room, my mother opens her purse and hands a hairbrush to the receptionist who sits me down behind the check-in desk. She parts and twists my long hair into a dozen tight braids.
When it is our time, a nurse leads us into a small room where she attaches forty or so wires to my scalp with a pasty glue. I imagine I am a robotic mermaid. I wiggle in my seat, and the cluster of wires move across my back like hair. The wires transfer something from my brain to the screen. Mom calls these wave-like patterns my brain music. The beep of the monitor is a metronome.
Later, when we return home, my mother will draw a bath and I will sit in the empty tub while the water fills. She will undo each braid, dip her hand into a jar of mayonnaise, and loosen the glue that clings to my scalp. She will scrub and shampoo, scrub and shampoo, the water turning from hot to warm to cool.
***
I have a memory of myself on a chair, my limbs jerking, my eyelids open, then closed. I can hear my brother calling out for my mother, his feet as he sprints down the stairs. Ma! He shouts. Make her stop. She is scaring me. But the kinds of seizures I had as a kid were caused by abnormal electrical activity that occurred across both halves of my brain. Whether I was having an absence seizure or a tonic-clonic seizure, each one was marked by a lack of consciousness. So then, whose memories are these?
It is strange to have an experience that can only be witnessed by someone else. As a child, I was diagnosed with epilepsy, a neurological disorder that arrived as mysteriously as it would one day leave. From the ages of four to eleven, my body seized. My absence seizures were small and brief, staring spells that led to lapses in my memory. I would raise my hand in class, and by the time I was called on, forget what it was I had to say. Those seizures weren’t like the tonic-clonic seizures, where my body woke up sore. The absence seizures felt more like their namesake—tiny absences, sometimes hundreds of them, stealing brief seconds from the day.
Those years, my mother’s life was organized around my care. Three times a day, I turned to her for Depakote, medicine in the form of a bitter white powder that she sprinkled onto applesauce, to help keep my seizures away. My mother tells me the medicine made me lethargic, subdued, but what I remember as a kid is applesauce, too much of it, and my body, like a slingshot, asking my brother to push me on the skateboard down the street. The trick was to go fast enough to catch air on the uneven bumps of concrete, but to hold on tight enough so as not to fall. I climbed trees, and when I couldn’t find a tree, I scaled a stop sign. Here, my mother drew a line, but otherwise, she let me run. In the big park, there was a tree with bark as white as paper, where on the second branch, teenagers had written their names in hearts.
I didn’t think about the danger as I climbed—what if I had a seizure and forgot to hold on? There was a gift in that. My mother, determined to make sure I felt no different, didn’t make me wear a helmet like the other epileptic kid I knew. Somewhere, though, behind it all she was watching me, far enough I didn’t feel it, but close enough for her to see if my body started to give way.
At night, I dreamed I climbed out the bathroom window and rode a broomstick around Brooklyn like I was in Kiki’s Delivery Service. I soared above the trees, above the flat roofs of buildings, above bodegas glowing like lightning bugs on the street. The air was as warm as bathwater and in the morning, the feeling of wind was so familiar I wondered if I had in fact lived a different life while asleep.
***
I don’t know how to write about my mother’s addiction without splitting the story into before and after. Every transition feels abrupt, awkward. I want to tell you that my mother’s addiction arrived five years after my last seizure, brought on by the grief of my father’s death, but this is more a story of convenience than truth. I don’t know the origin of my mother’s addiction, only the plot points. Eventually, she would feel unable to get through the day without alcohol. Eventually, she would lose custody of her kids.
To remember my mother before addiction feels like keeping a secret. To remember her only in addiction feels like a lie. Still, every story must pick a place to begin. Some days I can’t write because of this fact.
When she is drunk, my mother has a habit of giving my number out. She gives it to doctors and police officers, writes it down on job applications and intake forms. Doctors call me for her medical history. Landlords call me to notify me of her disturbances. Strangers call me thinking I am her. Even family friends reach out to me, when they’ve accepted how hard it is to get ahold of her. Does your mother still live in Brooklyn? Is she sober now? I think I should feel grateful towards those who feel able to care in this way, but their questions annoy me. I want to avoid their texts and calls. I am not my mother’s keeper, I want to say, but I feel guilty. If I don’t know where she is, then who does?
In the mornings, after she drinks, my mother rarely remembers the things she has done. She is apologetic, her face swollen. I’m so sorry, she says, over and over again, and somehow the sorrys feel harder to hear than her curse words from the night before. It is easier to face her anger than her shame, and I dread what her blackouts ask of me. How much do I tell her?
***
Don’t you remember, my mother asks, all the time we spent in waiting rooms? She tells me about a seizure I had on an airplane; how my body moved like turbulence. I held you until we landed, she says. Don’t you remember? She is asking: Why don’t you remember?
***
When I was a teenager and we still lived together, I watched my mother from the doorway of her bedroom whenever she slept off the booze. I stood until I saw her chest move up and down, or heard her snore, or some other garbled noise of breathing. If she was particularly quiet, I leaned across her bed and placed my ear to her chest.
I know my mother’s addiction and my epilepsy are not the same thing, and yet, I don’t have a better analogy for how we loved each other. I want my mother to know how many times I’ve kneeled by her bedside, but so often our acts of love bear no witness but our own.
***
Does the story begin in the waiting room? My mother holds me in her lap. Hear the mechanical noises of a hospital—a beep, beep, the click of metal doors. Or does it begin later, with the need to return to this memory? We are fighting in the kitchen. My mother throws a plate and it breaks at my feet. The insides of a bottle of maple syrup slide down the wall. Tomorrow she will ask for forgiveness. You think I’m a bad mother, she will say. But I took care of you. I took you to every doctor’s appointment. I want to remember it all. Sometimes, now, when she touches me—a hug upon arrival, a comforting hand on my back—I cannot help but recoil. I try to meet her in the middle. I email questions from a cafe. Weren’t you afraid? I ask her. Yes, she writes back. But it isn’t the fear I remember most. It’s how close I had to watch you. The constant attention by which I had to see.
***
My mother is omnipresent—either in the panic of her relapses, or in the welcomed relief of her good days. Since the age of sixteen, I have watched her move every year to avoid the threat of eviction or landlords that refuse to renew her lease. Her moves are disorganized, panicked, and more often than not, result in lost items— the engagement ring my father gave her, one half a diptych that hung in our living room. Perhaps I should have felt grateful for what remained, most of which were photographs and records of my brothers and I as kids, but instead I felt only the probability that they would be left behind too. One summer, in anticipation of her next move, and fed up with drinking and disappearance, I drove to my mother’s house and collected a few boxes of memorabilia.
Among the stacks of pictures and artwork, birthday letters and report cards, was my mother’s writing. As a kid, I watched her write poems and songs on the typewriter my family kept before we had a printer. Now, her penmanship covered printed out electric bills and the covers of empty Manila folders.
Poetry has three truths, my mother wrote on scrap of paper. Past. Present. Future.
I’d like to believe in poetry then. In a poem about the birth of my brother—though it reads as if it could be about any of her children—my mother writes, What do you think in your half sleep? What do you fear in the half / sleep we share? / Before the sun pushes through I silently repeat. I will keep you / safe. God, please help me keep him safe.
***
Before my diagnosis, my mother thought my episodes of spaciness— a blank stare, slack jaw—were a sign of artistic prowess, for they happened, or she noticed they happened, when I was drawing, and even when she discovered that they were absence seizures, not artistic visions, a part of her still held onto the hope that whatever ailed me would ultimately be a gift. She put me in art classes after doctor appointments, and knowing no other famous figure with epilepsy, told me extensively about Van Gogh. She kept all my artwork, rarely organized, but there nonetheless, in the treasure boxes she made for all her kids.
My passion for art, like my epilepsy, left abruptly at the age of eleven, but one Christmas, when I am nineteen years old, and visiting my mother for the first time in a while, she will gift me a collection of the drawings I made during my adolescence. She will be excited to show me what she calls, My Epilepsy Portfolio. I will tease her for the oddity of my gift, and she will laugh, in on the joke.
Privately, though, I will be touched. I will look at my early drawings for evidence of the person I have become. I will make a joke about my queerness as I flip through countless sketches of women in high boots and jean cutoffs, cropped shirts and septic piercings. Look at this! I will text my friends. Look at who I was. There will be hands and trees and suns. Everything will have a speech bubble—chatting away. It is fun to play this game, to trace the past and look for the inevitable.
What I will not expect to learn, however, is how my mother saw me during that time—defined not by disability, but by creativity. The artwork will be curated in one of those fancy portfolios from Michael with a hard black cover. Each drawing—saved, selected, and bound in a glossy page cover. I will sit on my bed and flip through the pages, and soon I will realize it is not myself I am looking at, but her.