Renata in Relief

Prose

Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash

My lovely girl Renata sits in the garden where she always does — caught in a memory, caught in a happenstance far from here. She sits with a book in her lap, turning pages all the while, while a soft smile graces her face. The wind teases at her hair as if the god of air has thought it would be a fine thing to run his fingers through the strands.

Then she looks up at me across the way, and it’s a wonder she’s looking at me — just me — even as a part of me quakes inside.

Her head dips, barring her expression from me as her hair continues to blow in the wind. A storm’s coming: I can taste it on my tongue. But the beauty of it is that she’s sitting there, lost to that other world, and the storm seems so far from here when the storm clouds still seem so far away.

I wander in my mind, thinking back to old times and wishing for better.

But Renata and I — we are a sad, old story.

I close my eyes, and she vanishes, and — when I open them again — she is gone.

She is just a memory from days when I wasn’t so weary.

Rather than try to fight the muse with the fragments that come to me, I decided to write a fragment of a story from the perspective of a man who loves a girl named Renata so much that he conjures up an illusion of her whenever he is down on his luck. That memory sustains him. That memory keeps him going.

But Renata is, after all, just a memory. Just a memory.

Sometimes I think we’d do best not to dwell on memories as well.