Beyond Recognition

At 8 pm last Saturday, I walked into a dimly lit hospital room southwest of the cities. In the dark, blinds drawn so as to keep out even the paltry light of sunset, an old woman lay on a sepia bed. She heard me enter. “Oh...Wh-who's there?” She quivered. I came face to face with her, and yet not a flicker of remembrance passed across her face. For the third time that week, she hadn't recognized me. But that wasn’t what scared me. As I left the hospital 20 minutes later, I realized that the most terrifying thing was this: Maybe it had been the dark, or maybe it had been her condition, but I hadn’t recognized my own grandmother, and for a second, we had both been strangers to one another, mauled by the woes of a relentless Earth till even to our closest friends we are beyond recognition.