A Memory Atop a Hill

Something in the way the light graced her skin seared the image of her in my mind long after the eroding effects of time corrupted the known to transform it into the almost-known.

On that day, an old friend of my mother's had invited us to her daughter's wedding. I remember my mother and I traveling for miles and what felt like decades as our car struggled to climb the unpaved roads of the Rwanda that was now foreign to us.

The day had soothe the sun into slumber when we arrived. By then, most of the guests had long since retreated to their homes. The front lawn was littered with traces of the people that had come before us and the celebration we'd missed. Nestled in the house atop the hill, a handful of lingering guests and I listened as my mother and her friend spent a few hours discussing the bare basics of what they had missed in the past twenty years.

Mainly, there was a need to understand the other in relation to the younger versions they remembered- iterations of them I'd never know. Night had blanketed the living room in a quiet darkness that made me yearn for that type of simplicity. Without electricity, our group huddled around two lit candles whose light provided just enough brightness to illuminate the essential parts on one's being - leaving the mind to fill in the rest. 

“How come you never remarried?”, her old friend asked, as all the focus fell on my mother. 

In the dim light, I saw, perhaps for the first time, the full effect of the past twenty years. Half circles imprisoned her eyes that appeared black. Deep set lines, like road maps with missing names and destinations, had been engraved into her skin. My fingers ached with the need to touch them all, as if touch could provide some insight into their origin. They revealed unintentionally the struggles she'd endured and the toll of going at it alone for all these years. Yet with her shoulders pushed back and her chin high, she spoke. 

She did so as the candle light continued its slow dance with the shadows, neither of them ready for extinction. Though her words have long since rusted in my mind, the image of her appears before me just like the lines of her face- close enough to see yet too far to touch. 

By Christelle Agahozo