HOW DOES YOUR heart feel?
The last time I’d heard those words spoken, I was nine years old, sitting by my mother’s portable hospital bed, watching as the life slowly ebbed and faded from her bones. A white cotton blanket had lain draped over her legs, tucked snuggly around her slim waist, and her frail arm hovered in the space between us. Gentle but weak fingers smoothed down my cheek.
That wasn’t how I wanted to remember her.
Not the woman who had given me every reason to smile, to hope, to dream—the woman who had instilled in me the will to never stop wishing for a better and brighter tomorrow.
I wanted to remember her as the woman who’d danced around, singing from the top of her lungs as she cleaned the house. The woman who’d spend all day helping me create the ultimate blanket fort and then crawl beneath it and listen to me whisper all my secrets.
“How does your heart feel, my sweet boy?”
Broken. Lost. Confused.
That’s how I’d wanted to respond, because how else was it supposed to feel?
Certainly not joyous or happy.
My father had watched from the doorway with a heavy and emotion-filled gaze as I crawled on to her bed—like she’d done every night to read me a bedtime story—and curled into her side, resting my cheek over her failing heart. Tears stung my eyes, and a painful lump thickened my throat. I hadn’t been able to breathe. I might have been young, but I was fully aware of everything I was about to lose.
“Like it’s going to miss you.”
She’d kissed the top of my head and squeezed me with what little strength she had left, the wetness of her tears cascading down her face and soaking into my dark brown hair, but she hadn’t drawn attention to the water leaking from her misty and glass-coated eyes. She’d been determined to remain strong, as always, until her very last second.
“How does your heart feel, Mama?”
“Complete.” Her lips trembled as she drew in a shaky and tired breath, her fight waning but her hold on me remaining steadfast, never faltering. She’d gripped me as though she never wanted to let me go: like I was the last remaining thread tethering her to this harsh and unfair world. And perhaps I was—perhaps I was the only reason she’d held on for as long as she had. “With you in my arms, it feels so complete.”
Complete.
What did that even mean?
It wasn’t a question a child my age should’ve been asking, but considering they were some of the final words to ever pass through my mother’s lips, I was desperate to understand their significance, their importance.
How could her heart possibly be complete when it was broken, robbing her of all the life she had left to live and stealing her away from the people who needed her the most?
I’d needed her.
I still needed her more than anything.
As we’d lain there, I’d silently begged and pleaded to whomever had the power to grant such requests to heal her. Make her better. I’d never asked for anything, never wanted for more.
Surely, this one call could have been granted?
I quickly learned life didn’t bend to our whims nor listened to our cries.
We lost her that night.
She slipped away quietly, peacefully, me in her arms and her loving and caring husband by her side. And when her last breath expelled from her wheezing lungs and her chest evened out, I’d buried myself into what remained of her warmth, wishing I could hear her ask one more time—How does your heart feel?
Nineteen years later, that question echoed almost louder than it had that day. It rattled around my skull as my feet hurried along the wet and cracked sidewalk at the same rate that goddamn organ in my chest thumped against my ribs: fast and erratic, mildly delirious, and completely out of tune with the rest of my muddled thoughts.
Numb.
My heart felt numb. Numb to the feeling of betrayal—to the loss of a future that had never been in my grasp. The warm, late spring air whirled across my face as a thousand “hows” and “whys” screamed in my mind, taking up any and all available space left for rational thinking.
How could she?
I screwed my eyes shut, forcing away the bitter memories that had sent me bolting out the front door, only to reopen them as my body collided into a solid wall of another. Strong hands gripped my shoulders, breaking my fall and shaking me out of my stupor.
“Hey. Watch where you’re going, buddy. People are walking here.”
“Sorry.” I regained my footing and shook my head, the apology pouring from my lips subconsciously and with little sincerity. I was too drunk on emotion, too caught up in the disastrous aftermath of the last fifteen minutes to give a damn. Horns blared and the swishing of tires zooming through puddles on the street created a white noise that I prayed would serve as a distraction.
A distraction from what, though?
My life and how incredibly hopeless it seemed?
I stepped off the sidewalk and into the empty crosswalk. Bright lights blinded my vision as clarity and my life’s greatest moments flashed like a cinematic movie reel before my eyes.
Tires screeched. Metal twisted. Screams cried out in the not too far distance. The piercing sound of shattering glass rang in my ears as it rained down on the slick and glistening asphalt, and the arresting and potent smell of gasoline suffocated my lungs as it coated the moisture-laden air.
Everything that had happened in my feeble existence no longer mattered.
Not when the entire world dulled to black.