The Woman Who Never Forgot

She sits on the park bench, a cigarette dangling from her trembling lips. Her eyes are two black empty holes staring past anything we can see. She is tired and old, her joints worn and aching. Her scraggly gray hair hangs in limp, lifeless strands from the unkempt bun positioned atop her head. A cat sits loyally by her side, curled up in a small purring ball as it sleeps nestled beside her.
The cat has no name. Maybe because it doesn’t belong to her. And in turn, she doesn’t belong to it either. Maybe that’s why she keeps it so close. That’s the thing about cats, they whine and they complain but at the end of it, they stay. Without ever saying a word, the woman and the cat have formed a long-standing alliance. Both sides saying, “I don’t need you.” And both responding with, “But you’ll still stay.”
When she closes her eyes, you can see who she used to be. The wrinkles silently fade and her hair turns from gray to a startling chestnut brown and suddenly there is a light in her eyes. A light that hasn’t been there for some time. The light in her eyes burns so bright that it seems impossible that it will ever burn out. Until the day when the glistening orange flame fades into embers and then one day when she’s forgotten what it’s like to be happy, it finally goes out.
And then there is no more light.
The leaves fall creating a golden carpet around her but she doesn’t pay them any attention. She ignores the world around her; the children laughing, the cars bustling, the dogs barking, the loud phone calls going on nearby as people briskly move onwards to start their busy day. She pays no attention to the world around her, as if that makes it any easier that the world pays no attention to her.
She takes a final breath from her cigarette before tossing it on the ground at her feet and putting it out with the heel of her worn boot. She exhales deeply then, and the smoke curls up into the air and fades into the background until it disappears all together.
As the day wears on, the people in the park begin to scatter, going their separate ways until she sits alone in the park, the cat unmoving beside her. The sun begins to set casting the ground in a bright orange, making the leaves look as if they are on fire and this whole inexplicable existence is about to burst into flames.
The old woman continues to stare out towards the horizon at something only she can see. She smiles to herself, but her expression is pained as if it hurts too much to look. When she thinks no one is watching she closes her eyes, that injured smile still tugging on her lips, and lets a single tear slip down her dirt streaked cheek.
When she opens her eyes, that imaginary image she had her eyes fixed on is gone and with it the painful reminder that she had lost everything. The tears flow freely then as she buries her head in her hands and her shoulders softly shake with sobs. She spent most of her life trying to forget the world but never could.
Maybe that’s what hurt so much. She could never forget about the miserable world that had long since forgotten about her.