Isabela Part 3

A flashback of my father teaching me to play the piano floods my mind, as my body gets lost in longing. His brown hair, warm and kind eyes, the gentle voice as he patiently taught me to use the red instrument... When I turned eight, he gave me the piano that now sits in my living room. It was never just a piano, but the most sacred artifact on the face of the Earth. I’m in love with that instrument, but every time my fingers touch its keys, his voice emerges in my mind in some beautiful moment we shared there:
"Take it slower, Bela. But you're doing great! I've never seen such a beautiful pianist!"
My eyes fill with tears at the vivid memory of him, and I can almost hear his voice resonating through the room, but I don’t allow myself to give in to the tears.
"Grandma, do you remember he used to ask you to make pie whenever he brought me here?"
"Of course... When my little boy called me, I would rush to have them ready for you two," she says, her voice full of nostalgia, and I know her heart is just like mine: fragmented.
It’s as if we were puzzles made of pieces that aren’t just ours. When another person touches your soul with love, they always leave a part of themselves. It sticks to your skin, enters your system, becomes a part of you. And when they leave, a piece of you leaves with them. Then we’re left broken. Missing a piece. And we’ll stay that way forever, until we die too. No one can replace that piece. No matter how important the new people we meet are, they can never fill the missing parts, the gaps left by those you loved. Because each piece is unique, irreplaceable.
Now imagine the hole left when the missing piece is your father! It wasn’t just a tiny piece, but a part of the foundation that held my entire body. Since then, I’ve had to simply fight to bear the weight of my existence, with this gaping hole in my body.
That’s exactly how it feels: having a hole that, no matter how much I love someone and try to fit them into that gap, they will never be able to fill the void my father left.
I love Ana, and although she soothes my wounds just by breathing in the same space as me, she isn’t able to close the rift in my chest.
I loved Nate. So much. And the jerk almost made the hole stop hurting, but when he left, he only made it bigger, bigger, and bigger...
Sometimes I dream that Lucas is alive. It’s pathetic how the subconscious can always fool me. When I see him, I throw myself into his arms like the little girl he left behind, who would run to him when he came home from work. And when his arms wrap around me, Lucas calls me Bela, kisses my head, and says he missed me. All I think in those dreams is: "Damn, you’re alive, you came back to me, Dad."
And when I’m in his arms in those dreams, it’s like hugging the clouds. It’s light, sweet, and good. It’s like... like I no longer have a barren field inside my body, a dead land that tries to consume everything when I remember I don’t have him anymore. And I try to fit all the weight of the things I’d like to say if he were alive into milliseconds:
"I love you, Dad."
"Can you help me want to live again?"
"Don’t ever leave me again!"
"Why didn’t you take me with you?"
I always say one of those phrases before my subconscious laughs at me and makes me wake up. I get kicked out of the dream, wake up into a nightmare, a reality that rubs in my face that my father is gone forever.
"Maybe I love chocolate pies because of that," I whisper, while I can almost hear his laughter, my hero’s, quietly telling me that giving me sweets in secret was our little secret.
I remember that my father used to sneak spoonfuls of pie into my mouth whenever my mother wasn’t looking. Diana was kinder when he was alive, but she was always a tyrant in some matters, and sweets were one of them. While she tried to stop me from even tasting soda, my dad would give it to me, and that made me always think he was cooler.
Maybe the details about my mother were always there, but I was too young to understand. She hated my piano. She forced me to leave it at Grandma’s house because she said I was out of tune, that I was getting on her nerves and disturbing her research.
Dad would wipe my tears because, when she screamed for me to stop playing, I would run away from the piano and cry non-stop. Lucas would tell me she was jealous because I was perfect, because I learned quickly, and that I shouldn’t listen to Diana. Maybe he knew my mother didn’t love me... But at least he loved me. Lucas loved me more than anything, and the day he died, he had told me over the phone that he’d be late for work because he was going to stop by a store to bring me a hidden cake. He used to call home every day at lunchtime, when I got back from school. He always wanted to know how my day was. And I loved telling him everything, as if he were my best friend.
I remember sitting on the floor, right behind the living room door, waiting for him for hours, eager to eat my cake and watch a cartoon with Dad. But the reality was harsh, and there was only one truth:
he never made it to the store.
There was no cake.
His friends said he collapsed in front of the elevator at work, already without a pulse. A clot in his brain ripped away the biggest and most important part of my life.
He’s gone.
His voice, his hugs, his beard that would prick my face while he hugged me and made me giggle: none of that is coming back. And there’s no point in suffering. So many years have passed, that the only remedy for the hole in my chest has been to resign myself to his loss.