I walked because stopping would have required a reason, and I no longer had one. My thoughts weren’t loud. They were quiet and certain.
He doesn’t want me. He’s leaving. This always happens. There is nothing after this anyway.
Love was the last lie keeping me alive. If he didn’t want it—if he didn’t wantme—then there was nothing left that wasn’t just endurance. And I was too tired to keep enduring.
The water kissed the rocks far below like a boundary. The roar of the waves a death knell. I wasn’t thinking about dying. I was thinking about not hurting anymore. Not reaching for someone who wasn’t reaching back. Not waking up into a body that only knew how to ache.
“Why couldn’t I have been enough?” I asked the sky. The words didn’t feel like a question. They felt like a confession. Like something I had been carrying my whole life and had finally found the courage to set down. “Why did no one ever pick me?”
The wind answered by wrapping around me, tugging at my clothes, pressing cold fingers into my skin. For a moment I let myself pretend it was her. That it was Mom pulling me into her arms the way she used to when I cried too hard to breathe. I tried to imagine her voice telling me I was worth staying for. That life was worth staying for.
But all I could feel was the absence. The hollow where she used to be. The hollow where he had just been.
I had been so close to something I thought was real. Something I thought was mutual. I had opened myself in ways I didn’t know how to close again. I had trusted him with parts of me that still felt sacred, even as they hurt. And now that trust was just… hanging in the air between us with nowhere to land.
I had mistaken safety for forever. I had mistaken being held for being chosen. The realization burned worse than the cold.
My hands shook as I pulled my shirt over my head, the fabric catching briefly in my hair before the wind tore it away from me. My skin prickled instantly, exposed to the night, to the sky, to the endless dark below. I stood there bare and shaking and stupidly thought—Is this what I was made for? To give myself away and then disappear?
A sacrifice no one had asked for. A solution no one would thank. A shudder ran through me so hard it stole my breath. My heart felt like it was trying to claw its way out of my chest.
“There’s nothing left for me now,” I whispered.
My toes curled into the wet earth at the cliff’s edge. The ground was cold and uneven beneath me. Stone bit into the soles of my feet, sharp and grounding and cruel. It felt right that it hurt.
A single tear slid down my cheek and vanished into the wind before it could fall.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for you,” I said to the dark. To the ocean. To him. To the ghost of everything I thought I could have been. “I think I’ve loved you since the night you held me on the deck. I think that’s when everything in me changed?—”
I didn’t let myself finish. If I finished, I might stop. So I stepped back. And then I ran.
The world narrowed to motion and wind and the sound of my own breath tearing in and out of my chest. The edge disappeared beneath my feet. Fear never arrived. There was only release. Only weightlessness. Only the strange, soft sensation of letting go.
The wind roared past me. Salt sprayed my face. The sky spun. A sound tore out of my throat—not quite a scream, not quite a cry—something between grief and surrender.
Down.
Down.
Down.
“ELLIOT!”
His voice cut through the dark like a wound. Raw. Terrified. My name pulled into a shape I almost recognized as love.
It was the last thing I heard. The world hit me and disappeared at the same time. Cold swallowed me whole. Soundvanished. Light vanished. Everything became pressure and dark and silence.
“Elliot!”
My name came through wrong—stretched thin, warped, broken—dragged through something thick and heavy that didn’t want to let sound pass through it at all. But it was still my name. I felt it before I understood it, a faint tug somewhere inside my chest, like a thread being pulled from very far away.
Hands grabbed me—rough, desperate, shaking. Hands that didn’t ask permission. They closed around me with a kind of desperation that felt almost violent in its tenderness, like he was afraid I might dissolve if he didn’t hold tight enough, like he was trying to keep me assembled through sheer force of will.
I didn’t fight him.
I didn’t help either.
Couldn’t remember how to move my arms or legs in any way that meant yes or no. I was too tired to choose. Too empty to care. Too stunned by the simple, impossible fact that he had come at all.
