When I was little, my grandmother told me that clouds are the most honest things in the sky.
"They don't pretend," she said once, squinting up at the afternoon sun from our front yard. "They come, they change, and they go. That's it".
I didn't understand what that meant back then. I just lay beside her on the warm cement, our shoulders touching, trying to see shapes in the sky. She always saw more than I did. Horses, teacups. Once, a dancing lady with a crooked hat.
But to me, they were just clouds.
My grandmother raised me on her own. My parents worked overseas and visited when they could, which wasn't often. It was always just me and her in that small house with the squeaky gate and the kitchen window that never shut properly. She moved slowly, even when she wasn't old yet. Like she was careful not to disturb the air too much.
When I was sixteen, she started forgetting small things.
At first, it was harmless. She'd call me by my mother's name and then laugh it off. She'd misplace her glasses while they were sitting right on her head. She once poured salt into her tea and didn't notice until I made a face.
We laughed about it. That's what you do when you don't want to name something scary.
But the forgetting didn't stop.
It grew teeth.
She began asking me the same question three times in an hour. "What day is it?" "Did you eat?" "Are your exams soon?" Sometimes she'd pause in the middle of a sentence and stare at the wall like she had misplaced a word and couldn't find it again.
I started recording our conversations on my phone without telling her. Not because I wanted proof. I just didn't want to lose her voice.
There's something about a voice. It holds more than words. It carries the way someone breathes between sentences, the small hum before they disagree with you, the softness they use only when they say your name.
One evening, we were sitting on the veranda watching the sky turn that pale orange that makes everything look gentler than it really is.
"Nan," I said casually, pretending I wasn't about to cry, "what if you forget me one day?"
She didn't answer right away. She kept her eyes on the sky.
"Clouds don't stay," she said finally.
"That's not an answer."
She turned to look at me then, really look at me, like she was memorizing my face. "Memory isn't the same as love. Even if I forget your name, my heart won't."
I didn't fully believe her. It sounded like something people say to comfort children. I wasn't a child anymore.
The next year was heavier. She forgot recipes she had made for decades. She forgot where the bathroom was in her own house. One afternoon, I found her standing outside, confused, asking a neighbor which home was hers.
That was the first time I cried in front of her.
She wiped my tears with the edge of her sleeve. "Why are you crying?" she asked, genuinely puzzled.
Because you're disappearing, I wanted to say.
Instead, I said, "Just allergies."
Near the end, she forgot my name.
It happened on a Tuesday. I remember because the laundry was still hanging outside and the sky looked unbearably blue. I walked into her room with sliced mangoes, and she looked up at me politely, like I was a visitor.
"You're a nice girl," she said. "Do you live nearby?"
It felt like someone had quietly removed the floor beneath me.
"Yes," I whispered. "Very nearby."
She studied my face, searching for something she couldn't find. Then she smiled. It was the same smile she'd given me when I was five and scared of thunderstorms.
"You'll be alright," she said.
Three simple words.
She didn't know who I was. She didn't know she had braided my hair before school for ten years. She didn't know she was the reason I liked my tea too sweet. But she looked at me like she always had when I was worried about exams or friendships or the future.
You'll be alright.
She passed away in her sleep a month later.
The house felt too quiet after that. The kind of quiet that presses against your ears. I couldn't bring myself to delete the recordings. I moved them to a folder and named it "Clouds."
Years passed, life did what it always does. It kept moving.
There were days in university when I felt small and misplaced. Days when I doubted every decision I'd made. Once, during a night when everything felt like too much, I opened that folder again.
I pressed play on a random recording.
Her voice filled the room, slightly distorted, but still hers.
"Don't overthink it," she was saying. "You've always been stronger than you think."
I don't even remember when she told me that. But hearing it felt like sitting on the warm cement again, staring at clouds I couldn't quite understand.
She forgot my name.
But she never forgot how to love me.
Now, whenever I see clouds drifting across the sky, I don't feel sad the way I used to. They come, they change, they go. That's it.
And somehow, that makes it easier.
Because maybe she was right.
Clouds don't stay.
But the sky does.