"I wanna make it so I could think good for just a couple a mont's, Doc."
Ptolemy's decision to accept the experimental medication is based upon his own recognition of his dementia. While he does not want to die, he wishes to regain his memory, even if that comes with a sacrifice of a slightly briefer lifetime. He wants to be able to use his time left better.
"That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side of a closed door that he’d lost the key for. So his memory became like secrets held away from his own mind. But these secrets were noisy things; they babbled and muttered behind the door, and so if he listened closely he might catch a snatch of something he once knew well."
Ptolemy is living with dementia which keeps his memories always effecting him but largely inaccessible to him. He considers his mind a vault of past memories, constantly trying to tell him something. He lives his days in a continual quest for the familiar.
"That's how powerful you are, girl. . . You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that's like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now they so beautiful that they can't bear to see you go."
Ptolemy loves Robyn with the kind of recognition that he can only offer because of experience. Having the benefit of having known a multitude of people in his lifetime, Ptolemy sees the authenticity and love which Robyn carries with her. She is the kind of person that people are glad to meet and sorry to leave.
"When you get old you begin to understand that no one talks unless someone listens, and no one knows nuthin' less somebody else can understand."
Ptolemy believes that people are inherently relationally oriented. He's interested in connecting with people because he thinks his experiences are his in order to be shared with other people, and vice versa. This is why he's so thoroughly moved by Robyn's friendship with him because he has longed for somebody to listen to him again.
