It Is Not a Question of If, But of When
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I went to the supermarket with my mother today.
We passed through the floral section by the entrance.
She paused by a bucket of pink roses,
lifespans trimmed short only to be prolonged by artifical mist,
wrapped in cellophane to be sold by the dozen.
Anyways, she paused because the roses reminded her of a childhood friend:
a girl named Hong
who wrote in tight, cursive letters,
who always had the best marks in math class, and
who watched her two younger brothers when her mother worked night shifts.
My mother and Hong would eat lunch together every day
in the corner of their school's courtyard,
just the two of them.
One day, Hong was missing.
It was no big deal, my mother thought.
Perhaps Hong was sick, or looking after her siblings.
But one day turned into one week, which turned into one month,
and my mother assumed that perhaps Hong had moved away,
which was quite odd because she had never said goodbye.
By then, my mother had begun to sit with another group of friends, and although
she missed Hong, there wasn't much else she could do but move on,
to move forward while trying holding on to her memory.
I know all of this because my mother recalled it to me
as we stood between bouquets of tulips and hydrangeas,
our shopping cart still empty.
She told me how her life had gotten so busy since then, with
growing up and moving out and graduating and working and marrying and raising me,
that she had almost forgotten about the lunches she spent with Hong.
But seeing the roses made her wonder what happend Hong,
why she had left and if she was alright,
even though my mother had moved on nearly forty years ago.
I've thought about it dozens of times, and I've realized
it is not a question of if, but of when
a disappearance will turn to dust and leave no trace behind.