January 15, 2025
The doctor used a term that I, a man who lives by words, never imagined would haunt me: "progressive amnesia." He spoke about plaques and tangles, about a slow and relentless deterioration of the brain. I was sitting in an uncomfortable chair, with my wife, Helena, beside me, her hand squeezing mine with a force that betrayed her attempt to appear calm. I heard the technical terms, the explanations about the temporal lobes and the hippocampus, but my mind fixated on a single idea: I am disappearing.
The irony is almost cruel. I, Daniel Carvalho, who built worlds with words, who gave life to hundreds of characters, am about to lose access to my own vocabulary, to my own history. The doctor suggested that I start keeping a diary. A form of therapy, he said. A way to record my memories before they fade away. The idea seemed both practical and terrifying to me.
This notebook, therefore, is not a literary project. It is an attempt to hold on to myself. Today, I am still me. I remember my name, my age, 52 years old, my wife's face, the smell of coffee in the morning. But the diagnosis is a shadow cast over the future. And I, who have always been the architect of my narratives, am now just a character in a story whose ending has already been written by a relentless disease.
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