I Forgot the Word “Chair” and Naturally Assumed I Was Dying
I forgot the word “chair” the other day.
You know the things with the arms, you sit in it, has a back?
A fucking CHAIR. Yeah, so I could not, for the life of me, remember that word.
After the spiral and my children asking, “Do you mean a chair, Mom?” me exclaiming, “YES, FUCK, a chair,” I immediately felt my face flush with that pure panic flush. Not the embarrassment flush, the fight-or-flight flush. Impending doom feeling, if you will.
Am I having a stroke? Is this the first sign I’m losing brain power, my marbles or my ever-loving mind?
How could I not recall the word CHAIR?
I can visualize it. I can look across the room and see one. Pretty sure I am a chair expert for how flat my ass is from sitting in one each day, but alas my brain was like nope, don’t need that word anymore, delete from memory.
Really?
Of the shit we could delete from a brain that on a good day feels like a Vietnam flashback, my brain feels “chair” is the most unnecessary use of brain space.
You know what we could delete?
The time I called my teacher “Mom” in elementary school.
Gone. Don’t need it.
Every stupid thing I said while drunk between 1996 and 2010.
Delete the entire fucking folder.
The argument I had with someone 14 years ago that I occasionally revisit in the shower so I can finally deliver the perfect comeback?
I think we can safely free up that space.
My childhood home phone number?
Why the fuck is that still in there? That phone doesn’t even exist anymore.
But no.
My brain apparently conducted an internal storage audit and determined all of those files were essential to ongoing operations.
Chair had to go.
And this is the fun part about being 48.
You can’t just forget a word anymore.
At 25 you forget a word and think, What the fuck is that called?
At 48 you forget a word and think, Well, this is it.
You’re immediately diagnosing yourself.
Was that my only symptom?
Have I been slurring?
Can I raise both arms?
Wait. Smile.
Is my face even?
Why does one side look lower?
Has it always looked like that?
Fuck. HAS MY FACE ALWAYS LOOKED LIKE THAT?
Now I’ve gone from forgetting chair to examining my own face in the front-facing camera like I’m conducting a neurological assessment at home.
And once I’ve established that I’m probably not actively having a stroke, we move directly to option B:
Early cognitive decline.
Excellent.
So naturally I start testing myself.
Not intentionally at first.
But suddenly I’m very fucking interested in whether I can name the objects around me.
Lamp.
Good.
Table.
Excellent.
Couch.
Nailed it.
Television.
Still sharp as a tack.
Ottoman.
OTTOMAN?!
Oh fuck right off.
You mean to tell me my brain retained ottoman but chair didn’t make the cut?
Who is in charge in there?
Because I would like to speak to management.
Then there’s another layer to this bullshit.
The harder you try to remember a word, the further away it seems to get.
You know you know it.
You can fucking feel that you know it.
So you start describing it like you’re on the world’s shittiest game show.
“You sit on it.”
“Couch?”
“No. Smaller.”
“Stool?”
“NO. It has a back.”
“A chair?”
YES FUCK A CHAIR.
Congratulations everybody, we’ve won absolutely nothing except a fresh existential crisis for Mom.
Meanwhile my children have already moved on.
For them this was a 14-second interaction.
Mom forgot the word chair.
Funny.
For me, this has become an EVENT.
I’m going to think about it tonight.
I’m going to think about it tomorrow.
Three months from now I’ll forget where I put my keys and immediately connect the evidence.
First it was chair.
Now the keys.
We’re progressing.
And logically I know brains do this.
Words disappear temporarily. People walk into rooms and forget why they’re there. We put the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge. We spend ten minutes looking for the phone that’s in our fucking hand.
But logic doesn’t stand a chance against being 48 and suddenly realizing your body has started doing shit without running it by you first.
Because lately there are already enough unauthorized system changes happening around here.
My temperature regulation has gone rogue.
My memory occasionally clocks out.
Parts of my body are apparently considering disappearing altogether.
Hair is leaving places where I’d prefer it stay and arriving in locations where absolutely nobody fucking invited it.
So when CHAIR suddenly vanishes from the vocabulary, you’ll forgive me for wondering whether this is another feature of the latest software update.
Maybe this is just how it goes now.
Maybe words aren’t gone.
They’re just… temporarily unavailable.
And perhaps I need to accept that occasionally my family will have to translate for me.
“Can you grab the…”
Here we go.
“The thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing in the kitchen.”
“What does it do?”
“It makes the bread hot.”
“The toaster?”
YES. FUCK. THE TOASTER.
And then everyone can carry on with their day while I quietly wonder whether I should book a doctor’s appointment.
But there is one comforting thing I’ve discovered.
Apparently I can forget one of the most basic words in the English language and still retain an encyclopedic record of every embarrassing moment, unresolved argument, song lyric and completely useless piece of information I’ve collected over 48 years.
So I don’t think my brain is running out of storage.
I think whoever is managing it is just a fucking idiot.