Conversations With Heartache

Heartache: emotional pain or distress; sorrow; grief;anguish

Have you ever experienced heartache? The kind of ache where you can feel your stomach drop and hear your heart shatter. The kind of ache that takes all of the air right out of your lungs and leaves you gasping for a breath. Have you ever experienced what it is like to double over in agony, clutching at your chest violently because you want the pain in your heart to go away? Has the pain ever been so consistent that you wish for something to come and take it away just so you could breathe? Has the pain always been there that you grow used to it to the point where it just becomes a dull ache?

Heartache and Trini Gomez are old friends.

She is five years old when she experiences her very first heartache.

Mr. Bubbles, her pet fish, (OK, she was five years old. Not an age where anyone is the most creative) wasn’t moving and she spent fifteen minutes tapping his bowl to get him to wake up. She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t moving or why he wasn’t responding to her calls. She’s about to reach into the bowl to poke him with her finger when Pap í walks into her room asking her to come downstairs for lunch. He sees her with her hand about an inch from the water and asks,

“Mija, what’re you doing?”

Trini looks up eyes sparkling with childish innocence, shooting her pap í a lopsided gap-toothed grin before replying, “Mr. Bubbles is sleeping and I wanted to wake him up.”

She was too young to understand the look that crosses her Pap í ’s face when he hears her words. What she does remember are the words that came out his mouth when he saw the fish floating in the bowl.

“Mija, Mr. Bubbles is in heaven now”

The tears come before she can stop them. Had Trini been older, she would have realized that her beloved fish dying would be the start of a complete and utterly shitty time in her life. But she was five; what did she know about heartache? That day, only one thing was certain: She had lost her first best friend.

*

It happens again two years later.

Trini is seven years old and starting her first day of second grade. She is so proud of her pretty yellow dress that she had picked out specifically for her first day and the bows in her hair. Mam í took pictures before she drove Trini to school. She didn’t understand why Mam í was crying, but she guessed it was because she was happy due to the smile on her face (Can you blame her seven-year-old mind?) Next thing Trini knows, she’s walking into the classroom. Her teacher, Ms. Brown, smiles as she introduces the smiling young girl to the class and tells her to take a seat next to a girl named Amy (Or at least that’s what Trini thinks the girl’s name is).

Trini takes her seat and introduces herself like her Mam í taught her (Full name and pretty smile, like all ladies should).

“Hi! I’m Trinidad Gomez.” She smiles brightly, proudly showing the gap in her teeth.

Instead of smiling back and introducing herself, the other girl just points and laughs at her.

 “You have chipmunk teeth!”

Trini pouts at her response. She knows she had a gap in her teeth, but she couldn’t have chipmunk teeth. That’s not what her Mam í says, at least. Amy just keeps laughing and points her finger at Trini’s dress. The dress was her favorite because when she she saw it her first thought was “Oh pretty dress” and when her parents saw it they complimented her by saying yellow was her color.

“Why are you wearing yellow? It doesn’t look good on you.”

(That comment would later be extremely ironic to Trini).