• I hesitated on the threshold of the broken and crumbling doorway. I stood still for several minutes, my hand resting on the wrecked wall. My left hand squeezed tightly around the chain of my mother’s heart as I swallowed a large lump of emotions and silently demanded my unshed tears stay put. I would not cry. I was done crying over the past; I knew that they did not want me to be sad.

    My feet carried me slowly into the crumbling, burned remains of the small house where I had been born. I stopped in front of a large mound in the weed strewn dirt floor. It had been marked with a simple headstone put up in the rush of a swift, peaceful death and the need to move quickly onward. The grave held the remains of a father I met only moments before his time had come but I still knew I loved him. It held the remains of a father and husband who waited until his end in the ruined home of his young family; waited for the return of his wife and daughter whom he had been separated from by a terrible, painful war.

    I have absolutely no memory of living in this house but I can still feel the sorrow and longing and love radiating from its ruins. I had to scold myself again for almost letting my tears free. I knelt down by the gravestone, careful of my swollen stomach engorged by a filling womb. I held up my mother’s crystallized heart to the sky. It glinted as a blood colored ruby in the setting sun. My skin and nerves picked up on the magic radiating from the stone, a magic that was probably the only reason I lived today.

    “You told me to keep this with me until I didn’t need it anymore Dad.” My whisper was carried off by the wind, “And I think I don’t need Mom any longer; but I know you do.” With careful fingers only a surgeon possessed, I wound the chain around the rough rock. My hands lingered on the engraving in the stone; it held both my parents’ names. My mother had no grave and they deserve to be together after such a long time apart. My mother’s body had long since been cremated and the ashes scattered to the winds; her heart was the only thing to survive and the only thing my father had ever needed.

    I lingered at the grave for some time and only made a move to leave when the sky began growing too dark. I still had to get back to the village and to my husband waiting impatiently in our rented room in the town’s only inn. I rested a hand on the evidence of my pregnancy and with happiness, felt my unborn child stir. I made my way to the crumbling doorway and again paused before I went on. I looked back over my shoulder and noticed my mother’s heart seemed to glow with a happy radiance in the disappearing light. My body pressed onward and I let a soft, bittersweet smile grace my lips. The tears I had held back for so long fell in hot streams that could not be controlled as I let go of the memories and pain of my past. I walked in silence away from the place where what could have been would have occurred, and walked toward my new life. I did not look back again at the lonely, broken house that should have been filled with love and I doubted I will ever be back.