“I want to be untangled.I don’t know how.” My voice breaks as I choke on my emotion.
August presseshis 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 havea 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 pulledstraight from a kinder reality—that’s where he deserves to stay.
I liftoff 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.
41
VIOLET
“STARGIRL INTERLUDE” - THE WEEKND, LANA DEL REY
Everett
Talked to Dal, and we’re in. Let’s set aside some time to
talk about it more this week.
Thank fucking God.I close Everett’s text and slip my phone back into my pocket before hopping out of the driver’s side of my Bronco and walking around the back to meet Elena at the tailgate.
After the impromptu ash-spreading of my brother on Sunday, and both of our therapy appointments this past week, we’re drained. Everett, Leo, Elena, and I climbed back up that cliffside in the darkness, soaking wet, and emotionally raw. We’re still working out where we go from here, because the truth is, healing doesn’t work like time does. It’s not linear, moving only in one direction, always onward. The “ball in the box” metaphor surrounding grief is accurate—the ball starts out huge, relentlessly pressing against the sides of the box. Over time, the ball shrinks, not always hitting the pain button inside the box, but it never disappears entirely.
I think that healing can work much in the same way. Healing is the free space. At first, it’s nonexistent. There is only pain. As that ball shrinks, our healed soul fills the space around it. We never lose the ball, though, and sometimes we press the pain button on purpose, because we know it’s going to create more space for healing in the long run.
We spilled our truths and our lies, and all of us will be better for it eventually, but we also flooded ourselves with pain, and we’ve got to tread through it until we’re standing on solid ground again.
I took some time to myself over the past week to envision the future I want for Elena and myself, and how I want us to keep making as much forward momentum as possible. I pulled aside Everett this week to float an idea by him, and now that I have confirmation that he and Dahlia are on board, I can run it past Elena too.
Hopefully, everything works out, because I’m already several steps ahead.
“Are we here to stargaze again, Augustus?” Elena asks, smiling mischievously as she leans against the back of my Bronco.
“Not exactly.” I take her hand, pulling her away from my truck and off the gravel lot. The same lot I brought her to a few weeks ago. I walk us to the center of the field behind it. The same place we spent so much of our youth.
