When I was 6, I used to walk my grandmother up to her room. She liked holding my hand. When I went to her room, she’d always compliment me…
Years later, I realized that she had been studying me.
Not in a creepy way. But like she was trying to memorize me, moment by moment. Every freckle on my cheek, every way I smiled, even how I dragged my feet on the third step because it creaked louder than the others.
She’d always say, “Zaina, there’s something different in you. Like you’ve got gold behind your eyes.” I never really knew what that meant. I thought it was just a weird grandma thing to say.
By the time I was ten, she started forgetting things. Not big things at first. Just her purse, the names of my cousins, or whether she had already fed the cat.
We all brushed it off. “She’s getting old,” my mom would sigh, trying to convince herself more than anyone else. But then one day, Grandma put the kettle in the freezer and asked me if I was her sister.
I was eleven. That was the first time I cried over someone who hadn’t died. The diagnosis was Alzheimer’s.
Early onset. It felt like someone pressed a fast-forward button on our lives. She moved in with us officially the next month.
I gave up my room and started sleeping on a floor mattress in my brother’s. I didn’t complain. I couldn’t.
She used to hum when she walked up the stairs, and by now, she couldn’t make it past the second without gasping. It was around this time I started reading to her. I’d sit at the edge of her bed and flip through her favorite old novels—books she probably hadn’t read in decades.
Even when she couldn’t follow the plot anymore, she’d listen, eyes closed, nodding like she understood every word. And she still held my hand. One evening, just as the sky turned that soft lavender before dusk, she squeezed it tighter than usual.
She whispered, “Don’t let them throw it away.”
I looked at her, confused. “Throw what away, Nani?”
But she had already drifted off, her hand still warm in mine. At thirteen, I tried to bring it up again, asking her what she meant, but she didn’t remember saying anything.
She asked me if I liked school, then told me I looked like my grandfather—who, for the record, I don’t. By sixteen, she barely spoke. But I kept reading to her, kept sitting there.
When she passed, I didn’t go to school for a week. The house felt colder without her. Not just emotionally—physically.
My mom said it was probably just the vent from her room no longer running as often. But I knew better. A month after the funeral, my parents started clearing her room.
I was sitting in the hallway when my dad carried out her old bookshelf. Something fell out from behind it—a tiny notebook with a floral cover, all faded and frayed at the edges. He handed it to me and said, “She probably meant to give it to you.
Your name’s written on the inside.”
I opened it right there on the floor. Page one: “For Zaina, when she’s ready.”
My heart jumped. The pages weren’t diary entries.
They were little letters. Messages. Some were written when I was a toddler.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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