Melinda

“I need to quote a poet,” Melinda tells Jose.

He smiles at her, “Neruda ciempre,” on the verge of some lightheartedness.

“It makes you cry and smile at the same time,” she replies.

“Andy Garcia’s voice?” he asks. She lets out the introduction to her laughters.

“I was accused of copying another beatnik author,” she tells him on a particularly cloudy day.

He smiles at her. “Please be stopped.” He knew these innuendos.

“I am forgetting his name at the moment. I haven’t read him yet.” Melinda looks at him with pleading eyes.

“You’ve been missing your lunches again,” he tells her, a way of reproaching her to perhaps sway her thoughts.

“It almost sounds like a Charlie,” she forces on. She had received a reply to her post that she was copying a famous author’s works. She was not to be bothered by careless comments. But she knew the possibilities, and she knowingly placed that thought as a reminder, filed with the list of things that interests her. And Rilke, she thought.

He could almost laugh at the prepared sympathies the world already held for him. He did not foresee that their perfection was as any other’s, in real time. Yes, it would matter to me. Yes, ultimately we succumb to time’s indifference, but I cannot just go forward in my mind a time without you. And she laughed and turned away. Somewhere down her scrolling posts and comments, she must have found something else amusing. “Pass me an energy bar, hon,” she asks her husband. Jose smiled and went over to pass his wife’s reaching hands a granola bar. There was no pleasure in eating anyway; make it at least healthy. She signaled for a glass, and he offered her a milk glass, which she took in measured gulps. She eats better when she’s happy. Oh, he knew that, but her sadness is so random to predict. Between a success story and a tragedy, she will let you tread as though one doesn’t differ much from the other.