Gina You are a face in the fog. Mist weaves and knits into my memories meshing and molding people and places of reality into symmetrical fallacies aligned with Old Man Imagination’s crazy tales of a thing, a place, a time called childhood. A dark, black blur sits atop your face as you become an acclaimed actor in the Shakespearean melodrama of our prepubescent lives. It shifts and changes but it never focuses and as much as I try to puzzle together your face into something more than an empty cavern I realize that you were never anything more to me than an entity who takes up space in the corridors of my memory. I wish you were more. As I answer the phone and hear his voice I wish you were more. “She died, you know.” A single copy cut-out of a clipping nothing more than black lettering on off-white pages taunts me from the church bulletin board. A paragraph dedicated to your life. As I read your obituary and look at your picture you smile back at me a twenty something girl with a life and a story and a past. But no future. I wonder if you ever thought of me. If you ever scrounged up memories of a thing, a place, a time called childhood and saw my face smiling at you. Did you see my eyes? My nose? My lips? Or did you see a dark, black blur sitting atop my face. Did you see an entity with just a name and nothing more? Did you forget me the same way I forgot you? Because all you are to me is an entity in my memory with a past and a story, no future, but an end. I called you Gina. You are a face in the fog. |