I. Diagnosis (Age 6)

They said it like a fact.

Like Tuesday.

Like weather.

Your dad has cancer.
The word didn’t echo then—

not yet.

I drew flowers on napkins
 in the waiting room,

smiling at the nurse with the tired eyes.

Hope was a coloring book—

not a question.
I watched grown-ups fold in half

when they thought I wasn’t looking.

He got better,
then worse,

then “stable,”

which meant
 we stopped talking about the end

but never really forgot it.

II. Hallway (Age 10)

It wasn’t loud,

but something inside me screamed
 when I saw the hallway.
White light.

Buzzing lights.

No music,

just the squeak
 of my sparkly pink shoes

on waxed floors that had seen
 too much
 of what was about to happen to me.
I didn’t cry.

I knew.

The scent of death doesn’t hide,

it seeps—

through fabric,

through prayers,

through the last place he laid his head.
He walked in and never walked out.
Hope,
that traitor,

never said goodbye.
Just packed up and left

like a parent late on rent.
I thought we’d take him home
 with warm blankets and soup.

But we took him home in an urn.
I was ten.

He was gone.

And a part of me
 was buried with him

without a name.

III. Echo (Now)

I still have the shoes.

Tucked in a box like a secret.

The glitter’s faded,

but they still know how to squeak
 when the memory creaks open.
I don’t talk about it much.

The numb is quieter now—

more like static
 than silence.
Sometimes I smell his cologne
 in a stranger’s coat
and forget where I am.
Grief lives in the corners—

folds my shirts wrong,

burns my toast,

waits for me
 at the bottom of old picture frames.
I don’t cry easily.

I don’t break loudly.

But I remember.
And that’s the kind of hollow
 they don’t warn you about—

the kind that doesn't echo

because there’s no one left 
to call back.