I Carry Your Heart with Me

I Carry Your Heart With Me

I Carry Your Heart With Me The age lines were apparent. I started to wonder. I started scribbling notes in my head. Those lines around her eyes and those lines around her lips and those creases on her forehead; do they hide the truth or do they give away the truth? Does each line tell a different story of a different time? And then I looked at her face. The lines of her scattered emotions were almost as apparent, but they were dotted lines; dotted lines that almost solve the puzzle of her thoughts, but not quite. “I miss him too. I… I’m sorry.” My words were flat. They seem to always float away into empty spaces since the past few weeks. It’s as if I had nothing left to say. They struggle to claw on what’s left of my emotion. Mum turned away from drying the plates and looked at me. “There is nothing to apologize for, sweetheart. You are around, and you will be around for a long long time and that is enough for me, Tracy.” Mum gave a soft smile; the smile that always made my pain floats away, the smile that I know hides her sorrow. I said nothing. Silence seems to be a regular guest in our house since dad is no longer around. Silence in the house, but screams in the heart. Truth is, I am in inconsolable pain. The kind that I’ve never felt before, the kind that don’t just go away with medicine and chemo treatment, the kind that is much worse than cancer. It isn’t physical pain – you can’t blow on the cut and hope for the pain to subdue; like how a father would do to his daughter after she had fallen off a bike. This pain crawls inside my heart and set up a camp there. This pain twists my stomach. Some days I can’t think – my mind consumed with the thoughts of my father. Some days I can’t breathe – my air filled with the memories of him. No, this is not the cancer doing. Yes, I do have cancer but this isn’t the side effect of cancer. This isn’t the side effect of dying. This is the side effect of living what’s left of my life without a...