Tea and tears

I pour myself another cup of tea and take a few deep breaths before I brace myself to tackle cleaning out the study.

When I enter it, the room is sunlit and full of my childhood memories.

I put my tea cup on the beautiful old desk and begin taking out the drawers.

Ouch - the last one is stuck and comes out with a jolt.I put my pinched finger in my mouth. 

I should have known, that stupid drawer was always difficult to open. 

Now the content is scattered all over the old Moroccan carpet. I take my wounded finger out of my mouth and put the now empty drawer on the desk next to my cup. 

I kneel down on the carpet with his bleached out colors and the intriguing patterns.  

When I was little, one of my favorite games was sneaking into the study and imagining that the carpet could fly. And I would sit there for hours and imagine all the amazing places I would visit. I had traced all the patterns with my finger so many times, I still know them by heart. 

One time I had even asked my aunt if the carpet could fly like in the stories she had told us. She had smiled knowingly and had kept silent.

My tears are flowing again. 

She had fought so long against the cancer and had finally lost. 

My brother and I were her closest family. I had visited her often in the hospital, and had held her hair when the side effects of the chemotherapy made her throw up. But even though she was a shadow of the lively woman from my childhood memories, she had become so frail and thin, she still had been optimistic and full of laughter and love for life. 

When the hospital called to inform me of her passing, I didn’t believe it. Couldn’t.

My brother immediately took care of the funeral and all the paperwork and I was tasked with cleaning out her house.  

Staying now in her beautiful house, I feel her in every room, in everything I touch. I miss her. It is an unbearable combination of overflowing love and slicing pain. 

I vigorously wipe away my tears and focus on the first thing I see before me on the floor.

It is a tiny silver box, most likely it was once meant to hold pills. In there I find dried flowers, a piece of light blue eggshell, and a few tiny colorful stones.

I smile through the new tears that are welling up. She had kept my “treasures” safe all those years, just like she had seriously promised my 8 year old self. 

We called her “aunt” even though she has been the sister of our grandmother. But even “aunt” doesn’t fully show how important she was to us, how central a part she was for my brother and me during our childhood.

After her finance was missed in action in the Second World War, she never married. She had lived alone in the huge house, where she and her 7 siblings had been raised.  

“Alone but never lonely” she used to say. That sentence only made sense to me after I had grown up. As a child I had always hugged her real hard, because “alone” was one of the worst things I could imagine as an 8 year old.

I put the silver box in my pocket and focus my attention on the next things on the floor: a few pencils, an engraved fountain pen with initials I don't recognize, a few post stamps that are long out of use and a folded set with fine hand pressed paper and matching envelopes. 

My aunt had gotten it when she was a little girl and she gifted it to me after I discovered it by chance between the old children's books one day. 

I had felt like a princess and carried it around with me for days.

Always opening it and admiring the little flowers and spirals. But I didn’t dare to use it, I feared misspelling something or messing something else up and end up spoiling the beautiful paper.

I open the folder and an envelope slides out. “To Daddy” it says in my 8-year-old handwriting.

 “To Daddy.”

After our parents split, my older brother and I had stayed the whole summer at our aunt. 

We built hideouts in the forest and she read to us in the evenings about Aladdin and Scheherazade, about bold princesses and fearless pirates.

Just before the summer holidays my father had moved out. His new girlfriend was expecting a baby. My mother had cried for days on end until my grandmother came and sent us with grandpa to our aunt. 

I hold the letter in my hands. How can something so little weigh so heavy?

I remember the loss, but I don’t remember that I wrote a letter to my father.

It was so long ago.

Since that summer I have seen my father three times. Once shortly after the baby was born. Another time years later in a shopping mall, he had a maybe 10 year old girl and a little boy by his side. But he didn’t notice me. The last time I saw him was at my grandmother's funeral two years ago. He expressed his condolences to me like every other guest there.

I carefully open the letter. 

“Dear Daddy,

why don't you come any more?

Does the new baby really need all of you?

You still loved Toby, after I was born.

Can't you keep loving us too?

I miss you, come soon.

Your little Princess”

A little heart instead of a dot on the “i” of “princess”. I had forgotten that he never used my name, but called me his “little princess”. Even when he scolded me.

I remember the loss and the pain, but it doesn’t hurt anymore.

Time heals most wounds. 

I put the letter on the discard pile and reach for my cup on the desk, the tea now cold.