Tracing Your Shadow through Shifting Leaves

Today’s letter is a seven-part drabble series, written when my father was diagnosed with cancer for the third time in 2020. I reflected on our family’s long journey and how it affected me in ways both seen and unseen. Each drabble (100 words) gives a snapshot of my experience, the disjointed format a reflection of the fragmented nature of memory.

It took me a long time to deal with and face many of the lingering effects it had on my formative years. I’m still teasing apart all those knots so I can bring them to the light and examine them with more courage. This essay was one such attempt.

1.

I am one and am not yet aware of things beyond my own self. I cannot see sadness in the eyes of those who brought me into the world. Before me, they smile only, and weep when I look away, as the doctors say there is little chance my father will live a year.

Our laughter mingles together as we play, and I am swathed in the warmth of their presence. To me, the world shines bright and without stain.

“We love you so,” they say, each time as though it might be the last, and I do not understand.

2.

I am four, and my grandmother comes to stay.

“Your father is sick, so we must leave you sometimes,” Mommy says. Grandma cries below the stairs when she thinks I am asleep.

I clutch a photo of them when I miss them, and I pray God would spare him, that we might share in more, all the seasons of life together.

A day is a month when they are away, and I cling to them when they return for brief spells, yet I do not recognize the strange smells that have sunk into their clothes.

“Stay.”

But they do not.

3.

I am six, and they say it is over and we will at last be a family. He comes back to me a stranger, with a barren head where thick black locks once were, yet his smile is undimmed still.

He takes us on journeys to new lands as though to drink in all the world, and to him I hide the secrets of my heart that I cannot speak to others, and I know I am safe.

When I am sick with fever, he peels an orange for me and feeds it to me piece by piece by piece.

4.

I am fourteen, and my mother calls me as I am collecting new textbooks at high school orientation.

“It has come back.”

My mother becomes a raging storm of chaos, and I watch my little brother descend into a whirlpool of panic that I cannot bring him out of, and I tell myself I will be the strong one, but I am hopeless, powerless, useless.

I learn who it is that has always rooted me.

Another round, then another. Nowhere to turn; I draw myself into an ever-shrinking nothingness within and find there only a labyrinth of my own making.

5.

I am eighteen, and once more he has crossed over deep valleys and come through to the other side. “A miracle,” they said.

We breathe again.

They send me off to school, and I revel in my independence, but also miss the tastes and smells of home. I realize then that I am less adventurous than ever I thought, for I would long always for that which is familiar.

“I love you,” I say now more often than ever, because I have learned that it is never too much, and the chance to say it will not always be there.

6.

I am twenty-four. As I had once wished, he walks me down the aisle and presses my hand into another’s who, like him, makes beautiful my world.

And he holds me as he did when I was young and tells me of the videos he had prepared during my infancy, in case, and I cry because he is here and not only a memory on a screen.

He says he, too, turned away in tears when he saw me packing my belongings for another home. Togetherness won through scalpels and bone marrow transplants is too precious to surrender without weeping.

7.

I am thirty, and I hear the words that now thrice have darkened my eyes. “It’s back.”

We are together, and we are together truly, but still I will not weep before them because I am strong for him, and her, and him, and us.

The ending of this story is yet unwritten; a voice tells me the many winters I passed with him were all but borrowed years, and I should be grateful. But I do not know how to trap love in a bottle, and the time will never be enough.

“Don’t go.”

But this time he may.

About Me: I’m Tiffany, a literary fiction, fantasy, and memoir author. My writing has been published by The Cultivation Project and Renewal Missions. I’ve been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023. Order my books here or here.