I turned to ash in the silence.
I was a man unmade.
And now, if the tide pulls you away from me—
If you go where I cannot follow,
If your breath stills before mine,
If the light in your eyes fades into nothing,
If your smile is nothing but a memory,
Then I will never set foot in the water again.
I will never cross the tide,
Never chase thehorizon,
Never let the wind carry me forward.
Because my heart is no longer mine to give,
And the ocean is no longer my home.
Without you, I belong nowhere.
Without you, I am nothing.
Without you, my breathing is worthless.
Without you, my heart forgets its rhythm and stills.
I will never love another.
Thedaysbledintoeach other, slow and bruised, the air inside the hospital room thick with sterilized silence and the rustle of too-clean sheets. Adrian was unraveling—not all at once, but in the quiet, cruel way life sometimes leaves. His body shrank into itself; his skin thinned until it seemed the light might pass straight through him. There were mornings when Logan could barely recognize the man lying in that bed—not because he looked different, but because he looked like he was fading.
His movements grew sluggish, like he was wading through water too deep for his limbs. Even the act of lifting a glass became a negotiation. His breath caught more often. His eyes dulled under the fluorescent hum of hospital lighting. Logan watched, helpless, as exhaustion draped itself over Adrian’s frame like a second skin.
The fight was a storm that never quite broke, hovering over them like a restless tide, swelling, retreating, but never fully gone. It came in waves—first, a quiet resistance, a sharpness in Adrian’s voice that hadn’t been there before. “Stop treating me like I’m fragile,” he’d snap, though his body told a different story. “I don’t need you hovering, Logan.” But his hands trembled when he reached for his phone. His voice cracked when he whispered Logan’s name in the middle of the night. His anger wasn’t real rage, it was a shield, a wall of thin glass, cracking under the weight of things he couldn’t control.
Logan didn’t argue. He stayed. He fetched ice chips and rewound movies they didn’t finish. He adjusted the blankets Adrian kicked off in his sleep, read him parts of books they both pretended to care about. He didn’t ask permission to stay; he knew that Adrian wanted him there, even in anger. But he stayed anyway. Because he had once walked away, and theguilt of that still burned in his chest like something half-swallowed and stuck.
Sleep evaded Adrian, broken by sweats and shivers that came in fits. Fevers left him soaked, breath hitching against the pillow. Logan would press cool cloths to his face, whisper nonsense, and count heartbeats. Nights stretched long and unkind. Sometimes Adrian talked in his sleep, fragments, confessions, apologies. Logan never told him what he heard.
And then there was Zack.
Zack, who moved like a shadow in the hospital hallways. Zack, who Logan swore was nothing, just a relic of a past life, a mistake made in the dark. But to Adrian, it was another thing taken from him. He saw the way Dr. Tierney and Zack exchanged quiet, easy smiles. He saw Logan say hello and it made something sour churn inside him. It wasn’t about Zack. Not really. It was about the betrayal of his own body, the war he couldn’t win, the mirror he now avoided. It was about how Logan looked at him sometimes—carefully, like he might break apart with the wrong kind of touch.
He’d never been jealous before. Never needed to be. But illness didn’t just strip away strength. It stripped away certainty, too, peeled a man down until all that remained was fear dressed up as fury draped over weak bones.
So he pushed.
He snapped. He withdrew. He said things he didn’t mean in voices that weren’t his. He turned away when Logan reached for him, not because he didn’t want the comfort, but because needing it made him feel like he was already losing.
And still, Logan stayed.
Through the fights. Through the moments Adrian refused to speak. Through the apologies that came not with words, but with tearful eyes and fingers reaching for his hand in the dark. Through the way Adrian’s back sometimes stayed turned long into the night, and Logan would trace the curve of his spine with his eyes, praying for morning.
