What are the lost things?
Same Walk, Different Shoes
“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.
What are the lost things?
I was sitting on one of the many conjoined metal chairs in the waiting room at the gynaecologist’s, waiting on Nella, who had gone into the consultation room. I scanned the room full of the many pregnant ladies, most of them with their partners, handing them glasses of water, tissues, and what have you. We had driven here through slightly overcast skies. I had told her, “It looks like it’s gonna start raining soon.”
I looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows, catching the first drizzle, which quickly turned into a curtain of downpour, transforming the asphalt road into a shade of charcoal grey. This was not our first trip to the OB/GYN. Nella had had problems, and we had been working with the doctor to treat them for a couple of months now. She had been religiously taking her pills to reduce pain, but they hadn’t seemed to do much to alleviate her symptoms. The one ceiling light on the far end of the room flickered, seemingly not concerning others but adding to my steadily mounting restlessness. An audible sigh escaped my lips.
A nurse walked out of the consultation room and ushered me in. “The doctor will give you the diagnosis now,” she said. I sauntered in and sat down on the cushiony seats inside the doctor’s office. I noticed that Nella was in a different room. A continuous stream of cold air coming from the air conditioner hit my cheeks. The doctor swivelled towards me in her chair, thrusting Nella’s file open and jotting down something using her heavy metal pen before looking up at me.
“Thanks for coming in. We have completed all the necessary tests, and as you know, other less invasive methods haven’t proven effective in treating your wife’s condition. I’m afraid this situation necessitates a surgical procedure called a supracervical hysterectomy." She continued, "It involves the removal of her uterus. We’ll leave the ovaries intact so she isn’t forced into the change too abruptly. It is imperative that we do this to address her health concerns…” She went on talking, but I was physically incapable of processing her words. My mind went numb with an incessant ringing of one phrase: "no kids." My heart was a beating box inside my chest, wanting to escape from my being.
Nella was in her thirties, and I, in my forties. As our relationship had grown more serious, I had admitted to her on a quiet evening that I didn’t want any kids. I already had one from my previous marriage, as had she, and I couldn’t envision having our kid together in high school as I was collecting sixty years under my belt. What had puzzled me was her accord—she had wanted children. With me. Consequently, we used contraception, but when we returned to our church, we halted the measures. Despite a couple of false alarms, we never conceived…
I barely managed to acknowledge the doctor’s words, bid goodbye, and walk out of her office. My past self’s decision weighed heavily on my trembling shoulders. As we walked to the car, the realisation that I had believed I could alter my decision at some point down the line hit me. I was blindsided by my own misplaced clarity about the desires of my future self, and now, the chance to have our child—something of me and her—was taken away from us, forcibly, forever. I succumbed to the pervasive guilt of Nella’s never becoming a mother, blaming it all on my selfish determination.
In the car, a brief stillness enveloped us both. The rain had gotten stronger, like pelting stones against the windscreen, the swish of the wipers on it failing to drown out my subdued sniffles. “What’s wrong?" she asked.
“I am just... sad.”
I started driving back home. I looked over to her side: Nella—deep in thought or perhaps just tired, I couldn’t tell—was lying reclined in the passenger seat facing straight ahead, watching the clouds burst onto the road ahead. Tears flooded my eyes. I couldn’t go on driving any further. I pulled over at what was a Walgreens parking lot and stared at the wall ahead of me in absolute stillness.
My wife, my wonderful wife. But not the mother of my child. Never would be. I missed our non-existent child. He came to me. I knew it was a ‘him’. I somehow knew it. I wondered if he loved the unloved. I pictured him petting toads, playing in puddles of rainwater, unafraid of letting a little wetness in. I saw him running in empty fields, and oh, of course, there was a dog. He had named him Simba. Yes, that I knew. But my son’s name? I did not. He climbed trees and hugged them. He had gotten that from her. She was a tree hugger through and through. I watched him slow his steps down and wait for someone to tie their shoelaces that had come undone when the rest of the group walked on. He always referred to his sports team as ‘we’. He was the kind who would find out and read his girlfriend’s favourite book without her mentioning it and then, on a random Sunday, quote it, catching her off guard and amazed. He’d treat her like a princess, so she’d know he was raised by the queen that his mother was. And when the time came, he’d think twice about having children and not do it wrong by his partner. He was a good child. He was so much better than I could have ever been...
Each breath felt shallower, and I felt pulled down, akin to a sinking boat adrift in an endless sea of sorrow and remorse. I turned to face her, saying, "I’m sorry," the words escaping my lips in a mere whisper, and crumbled down like a stack of cards. A deep guttural pain gave way to my loud, anguished sobs that reverberated through the air around us. “I’m sorry," my hands flailed deliriously, trying to grab onto something—anything—to hoist myself up and away from this very real, insurmountable sense of loss. It felt so personal that you’d forget that she was the one who had to go through the surgery. At that moment, I felt her warm hands grip my face firmly. She had tears in her eyes too, but they carried something else in them—love. For me, for us. As much as I was losing myself in dismal shame, her anchoring self held me with pure compassion. The downpour raged outside.
On the days leading up to the surgery, I couldn’t manage to look at her face. Only at night could I lay there by the lamplit bedside, unable to fall asleep, gazing at her pale, closed eyes, whose colour I knew so intimately. My wife. But not the mother of my child. She had tried to the best of her ability to console me; it wasn’t my fault, she had said. We still had kids, whom we loved dearly. However, that seemed like a frail, gaunt consolation—the last resort, an option no one willingly chose but merely settled for.
Nella in the hospital dressing gown was an odd image, almost always juxtaposed against her thin frame in a wedding dress—pearly white, as though the sequined stars formed a tapestry to drape themselves over her. Rarely can I picture that alone; there’s almost always a glitch that superimposes on it the image of her in the hospital gown, her voice calling out to me, “I’m nervous.” The former was a subject of my dreams; the latter was but the stuff of my nightmares.
I try to feel grateful that the surgery gave her her overall health back, but the ‘if only’ always manages to plague me. So what if I was sixty with my child in high school? So what?!
She approaches me with two cups of tea in her hands. “Chamomile, dear?”. I smile at her. How blessed I am to have her! My wife. And the love of my life.
She takes a sip, puts down the cup on the patio table, and turns to me with bright eyes. “Should we get a dog?”. I pause to take a look at her ageing face, still exuberant with the cheerfulness of youth, and mouth out a “yes!” with a long nod. “Let’s name him Simba," I say.
Don't we lose all the things we say no to?
She kisses my forehead, laughs, and goes out into the garden to tend to the blooming flowers.
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I agree with Julie. The rain, the chamomile, the thoughtful Nella--there is a tenderness throughout this piece. And the last line works really well.
I admire the atmosphere of this story - the rain, the flickering ceiling light, the daydream, the quiet scene at the end. The details feel lovingly chosen to convey the emotions so well.