When You Try

Time heals all wounds; that's the promise, at least. Sure it hurts now, but in a year? Five? Maybe even ten. It will all seem like a distant, horrid memory. Well, it's going on year four now and I've found that pain, the emotional kind, doesn't heal- it hollows. Where that space is in your heart that aches and burns with need, with shattered dreams, with grotesquely unmatched expectations, it will never be filled again, it will just hollow out. Like taking a scooper and emptying a pumpkin for Halloween. All that pain eventually dulls from an acute sting to a dull throb that leaves you empty, shallow, a mere reflection of what was once so alive in that space; and maybe that's better.
I have a theory that no body, no person, can take that sharp, knife-like stabbing pain for long which is why it has to be gutted out and turned hollow, so life can go on. So every morning when I open my eyes, knowing that the hollow will still be there, I brace myself, trying to remember what life was like before I walked into my kitchen and found my mother slumped over, milk sloshed all over the floor trying to make breakfast for my siblings and I, dead. I nearly succeed, spending my first few conscious moments seeing her face with its freckles around that small nose and dark blue eyes that had a constant shine to them. It's her face in my mind that reminds me of her ability to look death in the face and fight. She always told me, failing isn't failing when you try. And she tried, she tried so hard, but a bloated artery that suddenly busts wide open doesn't care just how hard you try and how many options you search for.
I may not open my eyes and face death day in and day out, but I face five siblings who've lost their mother and, with it, their father. But failing isn't failing when I try, so I try every day and I don't fail.