I am 31. I am supposed to be at a senior level at the firm by now. My mother calls from back home and asks about the promotion. She asks when the wedding is. I am sitting in a plastic chair in the backyard instead. The person in front of me is staring at the hydrangeas. He planted them twenty years ago when we moved here. He used to say this soil was different. Too acidic. Now he just looks at the blue petals and asks who owns this place. He is experiencing a total cognitive deficit. The neurodegeneration is aggressive. I see it in the way his eyes do not track the movement of the birds anymore. He held the hose today for twenty minutes. He didn't turn the water on. He just stood there. I watched from the window. I didn't go out to help. I just recorded the duration of the episode in my notes. That is how I deal with the situation. I treat it like a data point. My cousins are all married. They send photos of babies in lace outfits. I send back emojis. I don't tell them that the head of our family doesn't know which door leads to the kitchen. It would bring shame. In our culture you don't talk about the brain failing. You just say they are tired. He isn't tired. His synapses are misfiring. I think about the "threshold" a lot. That is what I call it. The moment the facial recognition fails entirely. Right now there is a flicker. He looks at me and there is a three-second delay. A latency period. Then he says my name. It sounds like a question every time. Like he is testing a theory. Soon the theory will be proven wrong. I am 31 and I am waiting for my own father to see me as a stranger. I should be worried about my career trajectory. I have a performance review on Monday. I haven't looked at the spreadsheets. I am too busy watching a man fail to understand what a rake is for. The garden is overgrown. He used to spend every Sunday out here. It was his obsession. Now the weeds are taking over the thing. He walks over the flower beds like they aren't there. He crushes the plants he used to protect from the frost. It is a total lack of spatial awareness. I don't stop him. I just stand there. I feel nothing. That is the part I don't understand. I should be crying. People in movies cry. I just feel heavy. Like my bones are made of lead. Maybe it is the exhaustion. Maybe I am just broken in the same way he is. We had a conversation yesterday. Or a version of one. He asked me where the girl went. I asked what girl. He said the one who used to play here. I am that girl. I was standing right there. I told him she went to work. He nodded. He seemed relieved. He doesn't want to know that the girl turned into this tired woman who hates her job and spends her nights Googling "palliative care" and "atrophy." He wants the girl. I can't give him that. I can only give him his pills and make sure he doesn't wander into the street. I wonder if this is the debt. The price for moving here. For leaving the family land. My mother says we are blessed. She says the sacrifice was worth it. I look at him trying to eat a leaf because he forgot it isn't food and I disagree. There is no blessing here. There is just a slow erasure. It is systematic. First the dates. Then the locations. Then the faces. I am next on the list. I can feel the erasure happening to me too. I am losing my place in the world because I am tethered to this chair. I should be at the office. I should be networking. I should be finding a partner. That is the expectation. Instead I am monitoring the behavioral disturbances. He got angry because the sun was "TOO LOUD." That is how he described it. Sensory overload. I had to pull the curtains. We sat in the dark for three hours. I checked my email on my phone. My boss wants the quarterly projections. I typed back that I was "handling a family matter." Such a vague phrase. It covers everything. It covers the fact that my life is disappearing into his. The sun is coming up. I haven't slept. I am looking at him sleep in the recliner. He looks like the man from the photos. The one who worked three jobs to buy this house. The one who insisted on the garden. But it's a lie. The person inside is gone. It's just a biological shell now. A set of autonomous functions. I am 31. I am at the peak of my life according to the statistics. I don't feel like I'm at a peak. I feel like I'm at the bottom of a very deep hole. I'm just waiting for the last bit of dirt to fall in. He'll wake up in an hour. He will ask me who I am. Or he will just stare. I prefer the staring. It's less definitive. Once he asks the question out loud it becomes a fact. It becomes a permanent state of being. I am not ready for the fact. I am still clinging to the latency period. I am still pretending that the garden is just "messy" and not "ruined." I am still pretending that I have a future that doesn't involve changing the diapers of the man who taught me how to walk. I am 31. I am an immigrant's daughter. I am a high achiever. I am a failure. I am a ghost in my own house. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. I just want to stop. I want the situation to end but I'm terrified of what happens when it does. There is no one else. Just the weeds and the silence. And the blue flowers he doesn't remember planting. Over and over. Empty.