The Lake

At its core, this is a story about Alzheimer’s—about the slow, disorienting grief of losing a parent in pieces while they’re still alive. It’s about the moments that don’t announce themselves as loss right away: a pause that lasts too long, a look that doesn’t quite land, a familiar voice that suddenly feels like it’s reaching you from somewhere farther away.

I was thinking about how strange that experience is—not sudden, not clean. There’s no single moment where you can say they’re gone. Instead, it’s a series of small shifts. Subtle misalignments. Like looking at a reflection that should be exact… but isn’t. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

The lake became a way to hold that feeling. The mirror of it, especially—the idea that something can look perfectly intact on the surface while something underneath has already begun to change. The reflections in the story aren’t just there to unsettle; they’re meant to echo that internal dissonance. The sense that the person you love is still here… and also, somehow, not.

But underneath all of that is the quieter fear that sat with me while I wrote it: not just losing a parent you love this way—but recognizing that whatever is happening to them is not separate from you. That it may already exist, waiting, somewhere ahead. That the line between their future and yours is thinner than you’d like to believe.

That’s what this story is really about. Not just memory, or loss—but the moment you realize you might one day be the reflection someone else is afraid to look at.