PIECES
Word Count: 250
I found one in the pocket of your denim shirt. The one you used to wear on Saturdays, flung on over just your tee shirt, relaxing on the porch. Writing sometimes, reading a book sometimes. Sometimes fast asleep.
Another in the top drawer of your dresser amongst your socks stacked up in rows and layers of color so that in dim morning light it wasn’t hard to pick out what you wanted.
Pieces of your heart are everywhere. I wondered why, after I’d gone through all your things there were some missing. It made me think that there were things about you I never knew. Women, maybe? Women you told me held no more than a cell of memory in your mind. I wondered if they held some pieces of your heart.
But then I found one in the Italian restaurant where we always went for pizza with the kids. And when I started looking I found more.
One was in your guitar case up in your boyhood bedroom at your mom’s. I found one under an old maple tree in their front yard. Each child of ours held a larger piece than any I had found so far and in our bedroom, in our bed, I found the biggest piece of all.
Finally there came a day when it was all together, all complete and whole. I reached inside the wound you left and raised it carefully behind my ribs and tucked it into place where mine had died.
I so love your writing. This has so touched my own heart. Loss and with gratefulness, restoration. Can anything be more beautiful than what you have envisioned? S.
Shirley, thank you! I’m glad you saw these things in the story. Coping with loss is often so difficult and yet such an inevitable part of life that I think we can all relate.