Page 32 of Your Soul to Keep

And their pursed lips and knowing eyes swung the hammer, splitting my heart in two and crumbling my broken pieces to dust, leaving me empty as they cautioned, “You don’t want to run out of time.”

Time was never the problem.

Smiling on the outside while I bled out on the inside reminded me why I was better off at home on this day.

Every forced smile rejected my grief. And grief was all I had left of them.

By the end of the night, once Rudy and the rest of the staff left, I could no longer contain my grief nor my bitterness over hiding it.

My footsteps echoed in the now cavernous space. Emptied of life, the twinkling lights snuffed out, Ayana’s underlined my solitude.

Awareness of just how alone I was prickled under my skin. The world was huge, much too large for a woman to travel alone.

Two people shorten the road, pet.

It hadn’t even been a week since I buried Nan, and I wasn’t equipped to face this life without her. This was the first Mother’s Day I’d worked in years, normally opting to hide at home with a bottle of wine and a pint of ice cream.

Retreating to the coat check, I found my little corner and slid down the wall. My tears started flowing before my ass hit the floor. The sobs I fought to muffle left me breathless, my heart clenching tight around echoes of my nightmares until I couldn’t hold them in.

My harsh cry ripped through the silence. Starkly out of place in this beautiful space, there was no more room for it here than there was anywhere else.

But it refused to be contained. The honesty of it soothed the edges of my soul that I’d burned with every forced smile. Every tight nod.

Pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes, I rocked and howled at the unfairness of it all.

Up until then, I’d grieved in silence.

Because as much as I wished it hadn’t, time ticked on, and the Earth continued to spin just as it had each and every time my life came to a soul-shattering halt.

This kind of loss demanded a witness even if it was only me.

There’d been no burial for mourners to gather together to weep.

No unsolicited delivery of casseroles seasoned with love and compassion.

No memorials, no prayers, no flowers.

And the little empathy afforded me ran out as quickly as the last grains of sand in the hourglass.

Friends I’d thought were forever lost patience with my inability to celebrate their children with them, distancing themselves as if my sadness was contagious.

The one who promised to love me forever, the one who once slipped a diamond ring over the knuckle of my ring finger, the one who swore he wanted me no matter what, confessed I wasn’t enough.

I should have known when he wanted to focus on the pregnancy rather than setting the wedding date that I’d been on probation. A couple of years ago I made the mistake of looking him up only to find him married with three kids.

Kids that should have been mine if the world had had a heart.

I turned my face into the corner, hiding even now.

What did I have left?

Pinprick scars dotting the tender inside of both elbows from the daily blood tests and a full-blown case of medical trauma from four years of increasingly invasive procedures.

One broken engagement and my battered self-esteem.

An elastic-bound pile of unsent shower invitations.

Three hand-embroidered baby blankets.

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