Forgotten Faces

Forgotten faces We only get one summer to remember, the rest ends up in a blur. This one had lasted long and the girl I loved lived across the river, a beautiful little stream that serenely floated down to meet its doom. September, still summer though I knocked a neighbour came, said she had gone abroad, a Dane. Unseemly haste! I smiled, shrugged my shoulders, women! And I suffered the longest night. Daybreak brought a chill; dark clouds congregated it rained. Years later I was in a bar in Copenhagen an old woman with too much makes up on her haggard face, but those eyes, a memory stirred. Her hands shook when pouring beer into my glass, long nights, she said, and swiftly left, and a younger woman took her place. I left too, outside I looked up and saw the curtain on the first-floor move; those eyes. I had seen them before but refused to remember.