"The past should stay in the past!" I am yelling, but I am not being heard. Not being listened to. I look like a fresh-faced seventeen-year old, just back from the war, but I am over eighty years old and this woman knows it. She has not been well served by these years apart: while I have not physically aged a day, she is old: older than I ever thought it was possible to be. Her face is heavy and tortured by gravity that pulls flesh towards the ground, forcing lines and cracks and crevices into her skin. I imagine that under her prim pastel pink cardigan and long flowery skirt, her body is the same- vaguely corpulent and plump, hanging in layers like the jowls of a bulldog.
"Bertie!" She croons, "Bertie, my sweet, you came. I knew you'd come. I knew it. They all said you wouldn't. But you did!"
"Yes." I reply stiffly. She has no right. None at all.
"Dance with me, Bertie?" She asks shyly, a glimmer of the girl I once knew.
"No. I can't." I tell her. "I have to get back."
Her face falls, a childish pantomime of her childish petulance, and then it alights again. "No you don't!" She cajoles brightly, "the war's over! It's 1946. We don't have to fight anymore."
It is not 1946. How can I tell her?
"But you must tell me simply everything about the war, darling. I couldn't bear all this time we were apart." She presses, her arm brushing against mine.
"No." I agree absently. How does she not understand?
"Look." She says, and she takes my hand in her firm, calloused, wrinkled grip, and leads me to a mirror. I this I see her how she sees herself: this eighty year old woman believes she is still the auburn-haired beauty, with red lipstick beaming on her pouted mouth and a pretty dress skimming around her shapely body. "Let us go to the pictures, Bertie, and to the park. No one is stopping us, Bertie!"
I don't know what to say.
BINABASA MO ANG
real friends
Teen Fictionimaginary friends can come, just as quickly as they can go.
