Her room was still full when I checked - the wallpaper near her crib had worn as much as
me. My breath caught for a brief moment as several of the ancient memories in my mind that never sunk a meter below the ocean’s surface, began freely floating through the years and started suffocating me; maybe it was those horrifying moments of the past which kept sanity and I in an Argentine Tango, or perhaps I had kept my memories to drive me mad. I didn’t wish to remember so I ignored it until I wandered in the room.

I occupied my lonely nights in Elizabeth’s room because those twinkling emerald eyes of her’s stayed with me so clearly that I could still see her smile and her curls, dark  and messy, from her play-pin, and her feet running quick and unsteady around me, breath heavy as she exhausted all the oxygen that those tiny lungs could store. Last evening I did hear a high-pitched giggle, and rushed to the voice’s source near her closed door. But I couldn’t open it.

No doubt it was a cruel wind gust which had been grasping at the strings of my heart and couldn’t know that the house was empty.

        On her final day, with my mind distressed and our bags packed in the van, I rushed around and searched in that small crude irreparable eyesore of an apartment once more. On the decaying stairwell a disheveled man, angered by our daughter with a miniscule suitcase, stood there firmly in the summer sun, and I watched him, raising my voice accusingly about his inebriation. Then he yelled up to the apartment and threatened to call the police.

        Most of the long catastrophic fights with him were over quick and there were rarely any effects except this time. The screaming covered up the pleas of the then airless, suffocating coughs of my Elizabeth behind my back. As the fight grew louder the lifeless child remained on the landing until slowly I began to realize that the soft voice there that sung constantly for inconsequential strangers’ ears - a light, happy song had a muted tone. She’d followed angels, the angels who had broken their kind facades by stealing her and they became the cold and darkest of all moving shadows; my grief.

Winter found its path to me, bringing more cold into my freezing lifeless home and for a short cursed moment my eyes must have held her vision in the corner of my sight, grasping at that shattered image I never sought  nor desired, eye to eye for the first time in years with Elizabeth with something missing that I knew was lost.

And as I stood there staring at the young, kind girl, I thought of Elizabeth’s change when she first walked out of the colorless shadow near the end of her room. She had missed a important quality to be my Elizabeth, for her lungs must have sealed so tight. I did know that it was already too late for her, somewhere back in my scarred mind beyond my understanding, where the dark memories of the past hid under my conscious. 

        The specter stood for a while, looking at me, pleading for me to help her silently.  I knew I couldn’t but I tried to tell her how sorry I was. Praying for her to stop haunting me but still longing for her to stay. If I could have turned around on that summer afternoon, or avoided the abomination of a husband that I wedded, then maybe this room wouldn’t suffocate me.

Elizabeth disappeared in a white light, the haunting past that day by day runs behind me. She eluded me then, but that’s no bother - today I will move closer, leap towards our path faster ….until one dark evening-- When I can pass on, breath against the wind, forcing air slowly into my past for my green-eyed darling.