Heart-Shaped Life
Her clothes were in a suitcase in a corner, things hurriedly packed after her home was flooded by a toilet she couldn’t hear running. Precious little items were tucked away in a small green wooden box and three different cosmetic bags that I had given her over the years. These cosmetic bags, too, were treasured by her. I unpacked the suitcase slowly. The intense physicality, the reality of these items left behind, made it feel as if I might see her again, as if I was almost touching her. I won’t see her again. Won’t touch her soft hand or kiss her forehead.
I look at the corn growing in the garden. She is the person I would talk to about the corn. I used to call her with FaceTime and walk around the garden showing her every green thing. She grew tomatoes when I was small. The memory of being in a garden with her, hunting for tomato worms, pulling them from the plants, and throwing them to the chickens has remained with me, whether I was angry with her or forgiving of her, whether I was in a city or near the hills. When I wanted to excuse our distance, I considered the cigarette she smoked while I was in her womb, my premature birth the proof that there was more than one transgression.
Right now, I would smoke a cigarette with her again from inside the womb if I could. It would mean that we were both still alive. She is not, and that is all. I stood with her in the garage by a mural of a waterfall while she loaded the washing machine and smoked. I played on the balcony beside her while she smoked. When I was fifteen, she underwent open heart surgery and never smoked again. Thirty years later, the morning after she brought the suitcase to the hotel room, her heart stopped.
I have contemplated her heart in artistic terms after every hospitalization. A queen of hearts, a broken heart, her heart a galleon sinking in the sea. At first, I believed it was the shape of our lives rather than the death that was so tragic. But the death. The death. The death. Terrible punctuation to our heart-shaped, womb-shaped, lung-shaped, only life together.
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