Gina

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.