No trace of you...

A warm room...friendly faces...and machines. Machines that investigated every corner of my heart. Every pulse and beat tracked with remarkable equipment, and a watchful eye. Ferdinand, soft, large and furry resting nearby in his service vest. There was my heart. I could see it...I could hear it...there it was.

No scar tissue. No damage. No problem. A long QT beat which I've probably had all my life, yes...but an actual heart problem, no.

Of course, that is all really good news. Great news in fact...news that anyone would be thrilled to hear. My heart is healthy. Perfectly normal.

So, as I drove away from the cardiologist office I initially had a smile on my face as I thought about how lovely everyone was to me...how kind and supportive. I thought about how much I liked all of them. How I wished we could be friends in "real life". I was grateful for their gentleness, and their understanding...their reassurance that my heart was great. As I thought about my wonderful, strong heart...I started to feel it again. Clenching in my chest...pounding again...the signs of stress that I feel so often. I found myself crying. Again.

WHY is my heart just perfectly dandy?! How is it possible that there is no trace of the pain and suffering I've seen? Why isn't there some sort of evidence of the ripping and bleeding that I've been through? Shouldn't my heart have some trace of the loss it has been drowning in?

Looking at my body....there is no sign of my twins. My heart is wonderful and strong. There isn't anything that says they were here at one time. Nothing that can be seen even with the sensitive scanning equipment that measured each beat of my heart.

Simon and Alexander are simply ashes soaking into the dust in a wooded gully where twin pines sway in the wind. They are the sore corners of my eyes that have been burned by saline tears and rubbing. They are the palpitations that are simply stress related, but not caused by damage. They are the lump in my throat as I try to smile to tell the world I'm normal. They are purple and yellow flowers. Memories.

There is no trace. They are invisible.

Part of me is asking why it is that my heart doesn't look like scrap metal at this point. Part of me is wondering why that smiling, friendly young man with his ultrasound device didn't discover fragments of a heart inside of me. Part of me is screaming that it just seems completely wrong that my heart is still beating.

And yet...here I am. I am alive. Healthy. In tact.

The shards of who I was are invisible to all the faces around me. I am standing here in a sea of life...and I continue to swim.

No one sees the broken parts..because, like my lost babies...they are invisible. There is no evidence of what WAS.

This acute pain that I feel each day... is caused by something intangible... untraceable... elusive.

I'm told that one day, I will stop crying so much. One day, I will feel more whole. Hell...with stress reduction, my heart will even stop hurting in time!

Part of me is looking forward to that time...and the other part? well...honestly, the other part of me feels that it would be a crime to let the invisible part of my loss fade away into the wind. Because, without that...there is no trace.

No trace.