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.
I saw a prompt to make a portrait of yourself somewhere and thought someone should get to read it :)
