Chapter 3 #2
The cliffs were calling me again; they felt like my only refuge. The last place I felt tethered to her. There, it felt like if I breathed in deep enough, maybe I’d catch a ghost of her in the salt air, a memory wearing her perfume.
The narrow path through the wild grass hadn’t changed. It still held our footprints, even as the rest of the world seemed determined to forget her.
Every step felt like a liturgy—something holy and desperate—matching the slow rhythm of those mornings when she used to walk beside me. Now I walked it alone, reciting a prayer no one was listening to.
The ocean waited like the edge of the world. Calm for now. Patient even. I knew better. It could turn on you in seconds.
That was grief. One moment it was quiet. Bearable. The next, it surged, swallowing you whole, leaving your lungs burning and your knees scraped raw from fighting it. Just like the ocean, it pulled you under in silence and spat you out in pieces.
I sat at the cliff’s edge, legs dangling into the wind, the familiar chill biting through my jeans. The waves far below whispered stories I didn’t want to hear. My hands trembled as I pulled my notebook from my bag and cracked it open.
Not from the cold. From the weight of it. Because this wasn’t just grief. It was guilt. The guilt of being here when she was gone. Of still writing when she had so much left to say. Of waking up every morning, drinking coffee, breathing—like nothing had shattered me.
I uncapped my pen and let it bleed into the fibers, and pressed my palm to the page so the wind couldn’t steal it, the way everything else had been stolen.
And I wrote.
I carved my name into the hollow of my chest
and woke up with someone else’s ribs.
They slip like knives when I breathe.
Blood tastes like the last sentence of a book I can’t finish.
Grief sits on me like a stone with teeth
it chews, through tendon and sense.
I walk the rooms and collect the small accusations:
a chipped mug, a sweater that still holds her heat,
the slow, impossible echo of a laugh that taught me how to live.
Tonight the ocean comes up my throat.
Water fills my mouth and I am learning how to swallow the ocean.
Each inhale is a fist. Each exhale is sand slipping through a cracked hourglass.
I am drowning on dry land.
My hands are open and useless—splayed as if to catch something that will not fall.
They smell of salt and old coffee and the sharp sting of absence.
The wound is a compass; it points to everything I’ve lost.
I follow it and find only the same empty room, over and over.
I am a butchered thing: seams undone, stuffing spilling out
memories like bone fragments that grind when I move.
People pass with soft voices and soft solutions, and I want to scream that there are no stitches for this,
that sympathy is a bandage you peel off to find the wound raw and hungrier.
Sometimes the thought comes like a white moth—patient, painless—
a small mercy with polite hands, whispering of final quiet.
It is not dramatic. It is not holy. It is a tiny, logical plan that smells like clean rooms and no alarms.
That it arrives calm terrifies me more than the thunder.
I map my days by what I can carry and what drops:
today a fork, yesterday a photograph, last week a promise I made to myself and broke.
Grief is heavy as church stone and I am made of cheap wood.
I sag under it until the grain splits and the rain finds my seams.
Sometimes someone brushes my shoulder like an apology.
Sometimes I think of her fingers—how they smoothed the hair from my face, how they mended the world when it frayed.
Those hands are scaffolding and sabotage both: they keep me upright and remind me why falling can feel like relief.
If I speak, the words come out thin as thread.
If I don’t, they curl inside me like unused rope, waiting to be tied to something I can no longer hold.
I want the ache to stop. I want the horizon to close its teeth and take the constant tide away.
I want to be lighter than the memory that pins me.
But even as the thought hums, a quieter thing pulls:
the shape of her in the doorway, the way she said my name like a lifeline,
the small selfish mercy that I might be all she left to keep.
That little knot of duty and shame tethers me, a thread too stubborn to sever.
So I stand at the edge and count—count breaths, count stones, count the slow bruise of morning.
I let the salt carry the sound of my wanting out to the emptiness that listens.
I do not promise to stay. I only promise to be honest about the hunger:
how it gnaws, how it hollows, how it makes me beg the world for a pause.
If mercy is a thing that comes without knocking, let it be soft.
If salvation must speak in truth, let it say only this:
I am carved open. I am bleeding. I am tired of carrying the weight.
I am waiting… for an end, for an answer, for anything that tips the scales away from this ache.
I wrote to keep from unraveling. To trap the echo of my suffering on paper. The pen trembled between my fingers as my handwriting dissolved into a smear where the wind kissed the page, spreading my tears.
Folded the words into my chest and held them—foolish and fragile—as if that could be a prayer. Then I closed the notebook and buried it in my bag with stained hands.
The ocean kept talking. And for the first time in weeks, my lungs expanded as I breathed.
Anthony was sitting out on the porch, broad shoulders curved slightly forward, smoke curling between his fingers like it belonged there.
The lighter sparked gold in the half-light, briefly catching on the silver beginning to thread through his dark hair, and something about the scent of tobacco and twilight woke a part of me I wasn’t ready for.
Cigarette smoke, sea salt, and cedar used to mean comfort. It used to mean safety. It used to mean him—steady as stone, out of reach but never out of sight. Just like now.
It was a sensory memory I’d carried for years but never been able to place… until now.
He had kept me company more nights than I cared to remember. I’d spent years chasing this phantom scent and the safety it offered me. It had become integral to me in a way I couldn’t explain.
I’d craved it even when I couldn’t define what it was. Now I knew it was him.
Now I was older, watching him from the screen door, silently trying to fit the pieces together in my mind.
The lines at the corners of his eyes were deeper than I remembered, earned rather than worn, and the wanting hadn’t gone anywhere.
If anything, it had calcified inside my ribs—something sharp and jagged I’d never carved out.
He leaned his head back, throat exposed, and let the smoke pour from his lips like he was trying to exhale every ghost he’d ever loved.
I opened the door before I could think better of it. The screen creaked as it shut behind me, and Anthony’s eyes flicked to mine. Dark. Familiar. Not surprised just… there. Like he’d known I was coming.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” he said, voice low, smoke roughening the edges.
“You didn’t.” I crossed my arms, trying to look relaxed. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Still?” He offered the cigarette like a peace treaty. I shook my head. He nodded and didn’t push. “You used to sleep like a rock when you were a kid.”
I sat down on the top step beside him, just far enough that our shoulders didn’t touch. “Not sure I remember what that feels like.”
A breeze rolled in off the coast, salt-heavy and cold. The kind of cold that felt good in your lungs, like it could scrape something clean inside you.
Anthony tapped the ash from the end of his cigarette. “Storm’s moving in tomorrow. You can feel it in the air. Tide’s been dragging hard all day. Pulling like it wants to take something with it.”
I watched the way the wind teased his hair, the way the smoke curled around him like it knew him. “You talk like the ocean’s alive.”
He smiled, faint and crooked. “It is. Always has been.”
The quiet between us settled like a blanket—not heavy, not suffocating. Just there. Real.
“I used to think about it sometimes,” I murmured. “What it’d feel like to just… vanish. Disappear into the water. No sound. No mess. Just… gone.”
His head turned toward me slowly, smoke trailing between us. “You still think about that?” he asked gently. No judgment in his features.
I shrugged, eyes fixed on the horizon. “Sometimes. Not in a dramatic way. More like… what would happen if I stopped existing. Would anyone even notice?”
“I’d notice,” he said immediately. Quiet and fierce.
I didn’t look at him. I wouldn’t have been able to hide the heat rising in my skin.
“I know you don’t let people in easily, Elliot,” Anthony said, voice barely above the wind. “But you don’t have to vanish to be safe.”
I swallowed hard, throat thick with everything I couldn’t say.
“I’m not trying to fix you,” he added. “I just… I want to be here. If you’ll let me.”
“I don’t know how,” I admitted.
He stubbed out the cigarette and leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees. “Then let me show you.”
The porch creaked beneath us. The sky stretched out above. And for a moment—just one—I let myself believe he meant it. That I could have this. Him. The quiet. The ocean. The slow, careful way he looked at me like I was worth staying for.
Even if all I could think was I want to vanish without anyone noticing, his presence said the opposite.
That maybe… someone was already watching the water for me. But I didn’t trust it.
Good things didn’t happen to me.
Everything I cared about eventually died.