Chapter 40 – “Never Let Me Go” - Florence The Machine #3
“I keep mine in a leather pencil box he made for me when he lived in Wyoming. It’s on my desk in the sunroom,” August whispers brokenly. “He bought that house for the sunroom. It was going to be his favorite place.”
Sorrow holds me in a death grip, thrashing inside the hollow of my chest. I want to let it out on a scream, but I clamp the urge down, swallowing it with nauseating effort.
“I had these ones saved for you,” Leo chokes. “I didn’t think you were ready for them before, but I hope…” He’s trembling as he extends them to me. “I hope you might be ready now. I think you need them now.”
I take them with shaking hands. Staring down at the box, I’m unsure of what to do. I never thought I’d have any piece of Zach again—didn’t think I deserved it.
“I understand the guilt you’ve been harboring,” Everett says softly.
“I didn’t get it before, but I do now, and I think it’s time to let it go.
” His eyes bounce between August and me.
“We all fought, we all hated each other at times. I know for damn sure if Zach were sitting here right now, he’d be laughing at the fact that the last thing he ever called me was a whore.
He’d find it fucking hilarious, and he’d probably say it again just to remind me. ”
He doesn’t pull the laugh I know he’s attempting to from me, but I toss him the best smile that I can muster.
“We were young and tumultuous. We were reckless and loud and unabashed in the way we loved each other. We always have been. There’s never any way of knowing which conversation is going to be your last with someone, and I can’t imagine that the last words are what I’m going to remember when I die.
It’s going to be a compilation of every happy moment that came before them, and I think I knew Zach well enough to say he’d feel the same. ”
“I think every single one of us knew, even back then, that the two of you made sense,” Leo adds.
“I think a lot of people are meant to be in our lives. I think we can experience love in a million different ways, but some things are just…written in the stars. I think death might be one of them, and maybe his was. I think that our souls are another, and yours are fused like that.” He nods to August and me.
“At some point we have to accept that there are questions we’ll never know the answer to, and then we have to decide if we’re going to chase contentment without them, or spend our lives tangled in what-ifs. ”
“I want to be untangled. I don’t know how.” My voice breaks as I choke on my emotion.
August presses his lips against my head as Leo nods toward the box in my hands. “Maybe figuring out what you want to do with those will help.”
“I don’t know.”
“We have a piece of him that we can always keep with us,” August whispers against my temple. “Maybe we can let this piece go. We can do it together.”
“Where?” I ask.
“What does Zach remind you of?” Everett asks.
“The sun,” I say immediately, causing all four of us to turn our head toward the water where it’s fading rapidly, running from the horizon. “The sea. But I don’t want to leave him in the same place that took him from us. He’d hate that, wouldn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t,” Leo says immediately. “We don’t hate the ocean for simply existing the way it was meant to. We wouldn’t blame its nature.”
“Some forces are so powerful, so vast and beautiful, they can’t be tamed. We choose to thrive within their chaos. We learn to relent any constraints we wish to have on them, because they’re meant to be wild,” August whispers. “Zach was beginning to understand that, I think.”
Watching the waves form, break, and spill against the sand before retreating home—it’s reminiscent of the way it felt to love him.
The world is still cast in the rose-colored hue, that ethereal softness that feels unattainable outside of Pacific sunsets.
I realize if I were going to be left anywhere, this is probably where I’d want to be too.
A moment pulled straight from a kinder reality—that’s where he deserves to stay.
I lift off the sand and stumble toward the water.
I’m calf-deep when my knees buckle and I fall to them.
Waves crash over me, soaking me from the waist down as I face the wind.
I still haven’t found the courage to speak to him, but as the sun bathes the sky in scarlet clouds, I feel like I’m standing in front of him for the first time in years.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, voice trembling as I slide the lock on the box with a shaking hand.
“Even if I learn to live with it all, I’ll never stop being sorry for it.
” Tears stream, dripping off my cheeks to add new drops of saltwater into the ocean below.
“I’ll never stop wondering what we would’ve looked like if we’d made it past all this.
The kind of friends we could’ve been. I’ll never stop missing you.
I’ll never stop wishing I could’ve known the person you would’ve become. ”
Inside the box is a small plastic bag filled with his ashes.
I tear it open as the presence of my brothers appears, dropping to their knees on either side of me.
There is movement behind me before his chest presses into my back, arms wrapping around my waist. When he rests his chin atop my head, and the beat of his heart flows from his body and into mine, I feel at home.
Tipping the box, I let Zach’s ashes fall into the Pacific.
Braced by the strong arms of my brothers, and wrapped in the warmth of the love of my life, I finally find the strength to let go of the boy I loved to death.