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 sittingout 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.
