The void in my heart

The time away did wonders for us, almost a therapeutic experience, constantly distracting us from our reality. Years had passed since I’d spent Christmas with my eldest brother, so I enjoyed the time to bond again with him and his family. I cherish the memories we made together.

Right before the New Year, we packed up again to head toward our last destination. We reserved a hotel room right outside of New York City, giving us the chance to spend New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day exploring the Big Apple. The 9/11 Memorial site, as well as the beginning stages of the new Memorial Park, left David in awe and also filled him with great sadness. He still grew in my womb when the twin towers crumbled, so I didn’t realize we’d never taken the time to tell him about that tragic day in America.

We felt lured into the festivities surrounding the infamous “ball drop” at midnight, though the weather and some unforeseen circumstances led us straight back to the comfort of our hotel and a television that evening.

We did nothing but explore more of the city on New Year’s Day covering as much as we could on foot in a day. A long line already formed for the ferry ride to Ellis Island, so we decided to snap pictures of the Statue of Liberty from a distance rather than spend our time waiting in line. Instead, we hung out in Central Park for a few hours, taking in all the sights, and then inside the Museum of Natural History. The adventure of the city led us from place to place, hour by hour.

By the second day in January, we packed our things one final time to head back home to Texas. Mike drove twenty-two hours straight through, the entire way from New York City to Dallas. With only a day left to catch our breath and reorient ourselves, school and work called us back to reality quickly. Such a needed vacation, and I can’t say I even wanted any extra time to rest or recuperate. It felt good to enjoy our family of three again, to build positive memories together after facing such negative ones recently.

Coming home at the beginning of a new year meant closing this last chapter of life to start a new one. Hard can only begin to describe that process. Part of me still so bewildered by the chain of events over the last two years, I wanted to put the entire experience in a box, put the box on the shelf, and pretend as if it never existed or never happened, despite the reminders scattered everywhere. I didn’t know how to interpret the contents of the box. If I put them away, maybe they’d make sense at a later time when I could emotionally handle bringing the box back down.

 That, however, left me with a new problem. How did I go back to living life the way we did before them?

Those two kids changed me. They changed us. Our family before them no longer existed. We used to be whole, and now, we were broken. Once content with an only child, now something felt missing. We couldn’t just go back in time.

They say it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. Part of me wished I’d never met them, both for our sakes and theirs. But the other part of me knew how amazing it felt to love them and be loved by them. Deep down, I knew I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world. But now what did I do with the huge void they left in my heart?