Green Tea for the Heart Valleys

Your heart climbed mountains so tall it trembled from vertigo—it was always flying up those hills, forward and forward, until it was suddenly Christmas Eve and the white-knuckled hope of “maybe one more year” shattered against it.

To stop myself re-polishing the rows of amethysts and black tourmalines on the bedside table, I twirled your hair into braids, securing them with my ever-echoed plea of “you should’ve gotten an easier haircut, like mine.”

You didn’t listen, instead poured us green tea into your good china, the liquid tumbling with your laughter into the thick sage-smudged air, spilling forward and forward until it overflowed on your caffeine-jittered hands.

Nobody noticed because I held them—I held you while your heart rolled from the mountain, ignoring it like how you ignored orange medicine bottles and the scrub-wearing elephants in the room.

“Drink,” you urged, clinking our too-hot cups of green tea together after you studied the swooping heart lines on my palms, your own heart sighing into the valleys.

I tried to clean instead, assuring you accidents happen, but you smiled with the expertise of an only mother easing the expert worry of an only daughter.

“There are no accidents,” you said, insisting I chase my tabula rasa fate wildly, and I nodded despite my diagnosed kismet to be my mother’s daughter.

“Life sneaks up on you—it gets shorter and shorter right in front of your eyes, until there’s no more forward and you’re alone, remembering.”

You needed a nap, so I tiptoed away, concealing tears and my Percocet I slipped in the tea to ease the painful heart valleys.

Tiptoeing was normal, the golden child walking the golden mean of appeasement after Dad left—a fine line my fair-weather brother wouldn’t tread.

They both stopped visiting us last Christmas, as if the equally suffocating incense and death-sunken eyes pushed them out the door.

“It’s hard on everyone, don’t blame them,” you said, so I prayed their life lines diverged yours, Grandma’s, and mine.

You woke, too drowsy to finish your tea, while my dregs congealed into murky patterns of downward spiralling valleys.

I tried to reshape them, but you said tea leaves were pseudoscience—my future was a skyward mountain.

If our real fates were kinder, I would convince your heart to fly forward one more year.

Because I wanted you to fight, tooth and nail, but you wanted peace, tea and sentiment.’

“You can dwell on the regrets, or you can roll ’em and smoke ’em.”

There are no accidents—you spilled our tea so I would hold you.

The mountains gave you vertigo, but you kept squeezing my hand.

Your heart screamed into its last valley, flatlined and fated.

No flesh left to ache, but the memories will.

“Life sneaks up on you,” you always said.

You don’t realise how short things get.

“Right in front of your eyes.”

It got shorter and shorter.

There’s no more forward.

“And you’re alone.”

On Christmas.

Remembering.