A Piece Of His Heart

Nine

Waleed

Spending the night, hell, even stepping inside Eliza's house had been tormenting. I couldn't not want to go around the house, reminiscing the long hours of my childhood spent in that house, with Eliza.

Her drawings and paintings, the flower she said she finger painted in Grade 2... I'd been there for all of it. The stick figures— those were us, too. The poem written underneath, she'd come to my house to write it.

"You remember it, don't you?" Najma Aunty, Eliza's mother, spoke softly as I crouched down beside a pot in their lawn, tracing my finger over the crack in it. It was a pot of lavender that had become Eliza's favorite flowers— and scent, since she wore it all the time— when I'd made it a habit to pluck the flowers for her everyday when I returned from school. She was three years younger, and had started school later than I had.

"I do, but why doesn't she?" I mumbled under my breath, feeling helpless.

"She... There'd been an accident, Waleed." She confessed and my head snapped up. I quickly rose back up on my feet and dusted my hands, shocked and confused.

"What accident?" I tried to keep my voice as respectful as I could when all I wanted to do was demand answers and explanations.

An accident that happened with Eliza that I wasn't told about. My hands clenched in my pockets.

"She was nine, and had been playing with her cousins by the stairs. She fell and hurt her head. The doctors said she suffered from a short term memory loss, but nothing could be said about how much she forgot and when she would remember, but it was encouraged to let her remember everything on her own so it would all come back to her on her own pace and capacity. She wasn't even told that she suffered from a memory loss, and still doesn't know.

We didn't mention it again to her because she didn't seem to have forgotten anything significant. She knows she had a friend, Waleed. She knows about you. She just doesn't know it had been you."

She was nine, so two years after I'd moved away. How had she felt in those two years she did remember me?

"Why didn't you tell me about it? The accident, I mean."

"I didn't think of it as something very important. I'm sorry if you feel otherwise, I would have told you sooner if I'd thought of it." She seemed remorseful too.

I ran my hand through my hair in frustration. Here I'd been losing my damn mind ever since I saw her for the first time that day when our families met, then suffered a fucking heartbreak when I realized she didn't remember us, thinking it had just been because she was too young and had forgotten my name and face so she didn't recognize me but... but she'd forgotten me all together. She remembered what we had, she just didn't remember who she had it with.

"Is Eliza ready? We should get going now." I changed the topic, saving myself from the burn that spread in my chest at the thought the past. Najma Aunty looked hesitant but nodded nonetheless and said she would check on her before heading inside.

And I stayed outside, torturing myself by staring at the hearts drawn on the wall that must've been Eliza's doing. I remembered how she'd told me she loved doodling random shapes anywhere her pencil would work.

"I'm ready to go." Her voice came from behind me and I turned around, catching her hair flying around her in the autumn breeze. I took the bag from her hands and walked behind her as she went out the door and toward our car.