He Doesn’t Remember, But He Knows

A Heather Robbins poem for caregivers

He doesn’t remember the trigger—
the spark that set the storm in motion,
the sudden outburst of anger,
the misdirected blame
that landed on me like a weight
I never volunteered to carry.

He doesn’t remember
how the air shifted in the room,
how the light dimmed,
how everything felt colder
when he went dark
and disappeared into a place
I couldn’t follow.

He doesn’t recall
the silence that followed,
the wall that rose between us,
the way I sat in the aftermath
trying to steady myself
against a hurt I didn’t earn.

But he knows.
Even through the fog, he knows.
There is a heaviness in the space between us—
the kind that lingers
long after memory has failed.

He returns one day with a gentle smile,
a soft invitation,
as if the long stretch of distance
was only a skipped moment
instead of months of me
holding everything together alone.

And I stand there, torn
between relief and resentment,
between love and self-protection—
because loving someone
whose brain misfires and resets
means living inside a cycle
that looks, at times,
like emotional harm,
even when intention
has nothing to do with it.

It carries the same loneliness,
the same ache
of being unseen
when the hurt happened,
the same quiet grief
for the connection we once had
before the injury rewrote the rules.

And yet…
beneath all of it,
beneath the boundaries I’ve built
to keep myself upright,
beneath the fatigue of surviving
what he never meant to do,

there is still something left—
a thread, a tenderness,
a hope that even without recall
he feels the distance
and wants to reach for me again.

He doesn’t remember the details.
He doesn’t remember the trigger.
He doesn’t remember
the coldness his darkness
cast across the room.

But he knows.
And sometimes,
on the days I am able to hold
just a little more,
that has to be enough.

If you’ve ever stood in this space, caught between compassion for an injured brain and grief for the hurt you’ve lived through, you are not alone. What you feel is real. What you’ve carried is heavy. And your need for safety, acknowledgment, and support is not erased by someone else’s injury. It all gets to exist together here.

With Honor, Heather