Chapter 7
Almost Is Never Enough
There is an ache inside me, deep and boundless, like the hush before a storm, like the tide that pulls and pulls but never returns what it has taken.
Something is missing. A piece of me is lost in the vastness, in the space where you used to be.
I feel it in the hollow of my ribs, in the silence between heartbeats, in the way my hands reach for something they will never hold again.
I have spent a lifetime at the water’s edge—though perhaps it has only been months, or days, or mere moments stretched thin beneath the weight of remembering.
The ocean knows my name now. The wind hums lullabies through the bones of the cliffs, and the waves, tireless and unyielding, lap at the shore as if trying to soothe something raw inside me.
I sit here, watching the horizon blur into nothing, and I let myself rewind.
Again and again. You, turning toward me in golden light.
You, laughing like it was something sacred.
You, eyes full of words you never said. I pick apart each glance, each breath, as if I could find some hidden meaning, some secret thread that might have changed the ending.
But there is no changing it. The past is a tide that does not return.
And still, beneath the sorrow, beneath the wreckage of what was and what had been and what could have been, I find something else—something almost like gratitude. Because for a brief and beautiful moment, I was yours.
For a breath in time, I lived in the warmth of your orbit, and that is more than most ever get.
But even the brightest stars burn out. Even the strongest waves must break.
I am tired now, in a way that sleep cannot cure, in a way that is deeper than the body.
I have been carrying the weight of something too heavy, something that lingers in my blood and in my bones, something I no longer wish to fight.
It is not fear, this surrender—it is relief.
It is the quiet acceptance of an ending long written in the spaces between words.
I do not want the struggle, the slow unraveling. I have seen it before. I have seen it hollow out those who fought with everything they had, only to lose anyway. I will not let that be my story. I will not let it strip me down, steal from me piece by piece.
I will go on my own terms, like the last ember fading into the night. I will slip into the wind, into the water, into the hush of things left unspoken.
And maybe, in the place where endings fold into beginnings, where time is soft and love is not something to be lost—maybe there, I will find you again.