Before her memories became birds and flew south, she was a business woman. Her specialty was money; thick, waxy dollar bills that she would rub between her fingers. Before she was a business woman, she was a girl. A silly girl, who believed her soft hands would change people and her wings would fly across the world. A silly girl, who ran towards the war instead of it. Perhaps she believed war was so different, that a nurse in Vietnam was somehow better than a nurse at the local clinic. But the stars looked the same from Vietnam, and so did the women.

She told me the war was rough. It shook her body and her soul. Her pretty white wings turned rusty and calloused, and so did her hands. There is not enough detergent in the whole of Vietnam to wipe off the blood stains, she learned. Being the silly girl she was, she never payed attention in nursing school and was quite useless at her job. So while the others bound wounds and soothed hearts, she closed the eyes of the dead. She closed blue ones and green ones, brown ones and gold ones, and ones whose color was too new to even be named. No matter how many she closed, every night they opened again to look at her, to burn into the silly girl.

But it was the rain that finally did her in. The skies opened up and poured and poured and poured. She stood outside her room, letting the monsoon wash away the silly girl with the white wings, watching the birds fly south.

Before, she had a boy. He was always a boy, even when he met her at the airport after the war. When he came with tulips on one knee, holding out the ring for her, but all she could see was his soft, soft hands. She shook her head and told him that birds must fly south.

After, she came back with her calloused hands, too rough to shape any world now, and turned to money. She believed if she ran her hands along enough of those bills, it would soothe the ache she felt in her fingertips. So she turned her business into an empire big enough to forget herself in.

After, she bought expensive creams for her hands and expensive glasses to hide from the eyes. She replaced her dirty nurse uniform for sleek business suits, and she bought a large plane to take her all over the world, yet her back ached with emptiness.

After, at the pinnacle of her success, she let her kingdom crumble around her. The world was puzzled. They didn’t know what to say. There were a lot of questions, a lot of regrets. She could have done so much, she could have shaped the world. Her empire, it seems, was really just a sandcastle. And when they asked her why she let it wash away with the tide, she rubbed her tired hands and smiled. The birds must fly south, she said.

Does a queen abandon her castle?If all the signs point to happiness, was does it mean you are happy? I never had the guts to ask her if she had been happy. I sat there with her on the veranda everyday after I served dinner to the others, watching the sunset. I sat there listening tell her story to the wind.

After her memories became birds and flew south, she never went to the veranda again. That is, until the evening on Veteran’s day. I watched her sit vacantly at her dinner spot, and then, all of a sudden, she got up and hobbled up the hill to sit on the veranda overlooking the lake. I sat down next to her,hesitatingly. Just as the sun slipped away, she turned to me unexpectedly, all vacancy gone. She patted my hand with her wrinkled one and a smile spilled across her face. A thin, crippling smile. The last rays of the sun ignited the tears as they poured across her face like a monsoon. She chuckled at my expression and turned to look down at the geese.

Together, hand in hand, we watched them spread their wings and push off from the lake, their eyes now fixed on another destination. She closed her eyes and leaned back, shaking her head softly.

“They fly south now, but I had forgotten.”

She had. She had forgotten they flew back in the spring.