i don’t know if this counts as a confession exactly i think maybe it’s more of a quiet observation a thing that happened that i think about sometimes when the light is just so in the afternoon and my hands feel tired i’m old now you see very old and a lot of things have settled out like sediment at the bottom of a pond but some memories they just swirl around and around don’t they i remember when my grandson he’s an architect such a bright boy always drawing sketching everything he was only what twenty-eight twenty-nine maybe he came to visit me he always found me when i was painting something impractical probably a landscape that no one would ever buy or a portrait of a cat from memory not from life i never had much luck with practicality myself always chose the passion over the sensible thing you know he was looking at my old photo albums the big cloth-bound ones you know the ones with the tissue paper in between the pages the ones from before digital cameras and he asked me if i ever labelled them you know the names the dates the places and i just laughed a little i said oh no darling never had the time never thought to i just knew them i knew every face every faded smile every awkward pose and he got very quiet then very still and i thought maybe i’d said something wrong maybe he thought i was sentimental or something but that wasn’t it at all he just looked at me with those serious young eyes and he said grammy i think i should start doing that now labelling everything and i remember the air in the room felt different suddenly heavy somehow a little cold even though it was summer and i saw it then a tremor in his hand that i hadn’t noticed before when he was turning the pages he was always so steady so precise with his architectural drawings and i felt a pang in my chest a strange kind of fear that wasn’t my own but was for him you know it was later that i heard from his mother my daughter that he’d been diagnosed with something a progressive neurological condition she said something like ataxia though i don’t know if that’s precisely it or just a word i half-remember from a magazine article about famous painters losing their touch but the details were vague because they always are when something is terrifying and she just said he was worried about losing his ability to hold a pen to remember dates to recall the faces of the people he loved and i understood then why he wanted to label everything i think about him now sometimes especially when i’m trying to remember a name or a specific year and it just dances away from me like a wisp of smoke and i wonder if he finished labelling all those albums if he got to everything before it became too hard i hope he did i really do because i think maybe that act that desperate act of trying to hold onto something when you know it's slipping away is a kind of art in itself isn't it a quiet kind of heartbreak