Amber fading to molten gold in streaming rays, blinding after a few instants, flow in the late afternoon through a window in a hall.

Fading family pictures arranged on a sheet of round glass atop a porcelain elephant’s back slowly disappear. A faded brown sectional from a sofa set sits quietly as refracted reflections shower it as well.

The hall is long and slender, connecting a dining room-parlor combination to sleeping areas and to a small library full of books already too often read. On the hall’s walls hang diverse photos and paintings adjacent to blank spaces where once hung other photos, artistic rather than familial, removed at a new mistress’s suggestion, exiled amidst collections of too many memories.

Silent echoes and reminiscences of echoes lurk in shadows that will form later, after the sun sets.

Afternoon cocktails and memories of afternoon cocktails long ago linger after four, sours of various kinds and margaritas with triscuits and cheddar cheese mainly, stirring memories become old before their times and then suddenly ancient.

Faces and feelings and recollections, all too often regrets returning to call, dust from roads not followed blowing in spiraling spiritual winds in motes and eddies, spiraling, joining later memories until they lightly brush the present.

Collections of unrelated in-laws and in-laws that never were but should have been, … perhaps. A chain of faded lovers and loves unresolved but unforgotten.

What is love anyway?

So many yesterdays striving to become tomorrows forgetting they should have been todays. Colors faded, some become pastels but most now just differing shades of grey. Queries in the air asking: “where have they all gone, what have they become, where are they today?”
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2020; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.