Shattered Mirrors

He picked at the callouses on his palms in an effort to distract himself from the raging rhythm of his heart; its turbulence causing the view before him to blur. He hadn’t heard her voice in fifteen years. He wondered how it had changed. Had it grown deeper? Had she outgrown her stutter or had it stayed with her? The last time they had talked, her speech was slurred from sleep she had futilely tried to rub away from her glossy eyes.

He wished he had more time to explain then and she the ability to understand better, to grasp the gravity of his pain and the fury with which it clashed against his bones. But there were no words pacifying enough to make her understand, in the middle of the night, that the same woman who cradled her at bedtime and made her pancakes every Sunday morning was also the one who had given him broken ribs long before she broke his heart. He was always eager to dish out forgiveness because bones could heal, bruises disappeared. But he was still loved, so very loved. She said so every time.

Her guilt-ridden promises and declarations were the threads he clung on to for dear life, using them to sew the coldest of nights into days with no light, even when the sun scorched his skin; the rays falling through, unable to rest on his shattered spirit.

The only light that kept him from plunging within himself into pernicious oblivion was the one that twinkled in their daughter’s eyes. With every smile on her little face, it shone bright enough to illuminate his world, even if for a mere moment, blinding him to the scars that relentlessly grew deeper in his heart.

Those were the eyes he yearned to look into again, and see them smiling back at him like they used to. For years, it was the memory of her eyes that both soothed and tortured his soul. Despite all the sadistic cards life had dealt him, the decision he was forced to make on that particular night was the cruelest of them all. The flicker of drive left in him to crawl towards a better life when the flimsy threads had snapped and he had decided to leave, were wrung out of him with every step he took towards a freedom that made his insides twist and his head ring because his little girl’s hand was not in his.

Daughters need their mothers. Daughters need their mothers. Daughters need their mothers.

He couldn’t take that away from her, no matter how much it made him want to claw his own heart out, so he wouldn’t have to feel the crashing waves of pain its jagged pieces sent through him.

The exigent chimes on the café door brought him out of rabbit hole of his thoughts. It still wasn’t her that walked through it. He browsed the array of cars in the parking lot through the walls of windows hoping that one of them would belong to her, allowing him a moment’s glance to look at her before she saw him.

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Her hands paled at the knuckles, as though they belonged to a ghost, with the grip with which she held the steering wheel of her coupe. She had been sat in her car for a good chunk of an hour, willing herself to let go of the wheel and walk into what she had imagined tens of thousands of times since that night over a decade ago. She had spotted him the second her car pulled into the empty space. He still sat with the same angled turn favoring his right side when he was anxious, one foot atop another, pressing down; his hack to stop his knee from bouncing relentlessly. His hair had tones of grey now, and yet it was fuller, healthier.

It was like returning to your childhood home after a lifetime. He was both a stranger as well as the only person she had ever cared to know every detail of. He was the hero before and the villain after. Watching him through the glass and a vision that kept muddling with unintentional tears, it hit her how her entire life had revolved around him, his absence. Long ago, she had decided he meant nothing short of everything to her.