Magdalena RememberedApr 20 '04 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line "Perhaps just remembering her name is enough to validate her existence to the rest of the world."
April ninth has come and gone, but the street near my apartment is still under construction. The sign with the date has been there for months, but there's no indication when it will end. As I walk to work, I see unhappy construction workers and impatient drivers. The world is full of them I think. A Jewish man with a cigarette runs outside to stop the city from towing his vehicle. And a squirrel and a black bird fight each other at the base of a tree. They only quit when I get too close; she flying away, he darting beneath a parked Mustang. From a window ledge above it all, a small dog watches and stares. He doesn't bark the way he used to, just looks. Everything he knows he can see from his perch. Nothing escapes him, but he doesn't know all that much. Across the street, a pair of caged birds chirp at the dog and pull themselves from wire to wire with their beaks. When I get to work, I sigh. And punch in. And the fortune cookie says "Get away from home awhile to restore your energies." I'm thinking about taking a job on a cruise ship. Why not? I'm still young. I could easily drop everything and head out to sea for a year. The clean air would surely do me good. Somewhere in Minnesota, just outside of a small town that no one's ever heard of, there's a graveyard that holds maybe a hundred forgotten souls. The people in the ground out there aren't just dead. They're not just forgotten. They're unknown. They don't even exist to the rest of world. A pile of dirt above their heads and beneath their tombstones is all that knows they're there. And somewhere in New York, someone is listening to a cd that I left there the day the towers collapsed. Or maybe the cd is gone now, disappeared when I stopped remembering that it was once mine. Gone like two one-hundred and ten story buildings filled with people. And somewhere in the world is a girl who once loved me, but who now can't even remember my face. What is she doing I wonder. She was with me in that graveyard one time, and we couldn't stop thinking about the people beneath us who don't exist outside of their dirt piles. There was barbed wire there, and we left a piece of ourselves to prove we existed. We drove away and never spoke of that place to each other again. A woman named Magdalena is buried there. I have no idea who she once was, only the dirt knows that, but I wonder about her. I wonder what she looked like. Maybe she was the entire world to someone, somewhere, sometime. Perhaps just remembering her name is enough to validate her existence to the rest of the world. Maybe that's all it takes. Tomorrow I'll walk to work again and punch in and sigh. I'll pass by the construction workers, the drivers, the dog on his perch and the birds in their cage. Maybe I'll see the Jewish man with the cigarette or even his car if the city didn't tow it. And maybe next month will be different. Maybe then I'll go out to sea and breathe clean air and restore my energies like the fortune cookie says. Maybe all the girls in the world who once loved me will suddenly think of my face and the sign outside my apartment will no longer say April ninth because the construction will already be complete. And maybe someone somewhere will remember how beautiful and important Magdalena was to them one time.  |
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