The Sea of Tranquility

by Katja Millay

The loud sounds make it impossible to hear the soft ones, and the soft sounds are the ones you have to be afraid of.

He made sure there was no place for me to sit on the counter so I’d be forced to notice it. Because the chair was meant for me.

“It’s a chair. Stop overanalyzing it. I’m not selling it and I’m not giving it to someone else. I made it for you. It’s yours.”

I know at that moment what he’s given me and it’s not a chair. It’s an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn’t given me a place to sit. He’s given me a place to belong.

Josh Bennett laughs, and for one minute, everything is right in the world.

He was supposed to come back so he could meet her because his heaven was where she was, even if he didn’t know it at the time.

“I’d ask you, you know. If I was allowed. I’d ask you a thousand times until you’d tell me. But you won’t let me ask.”

“It wasn’t so much that I wanted to see her again,” he says, looking at me with the depth of more than seventeen years in his eyes. “I wanted her to see you.”

“Why does it mean anything to you?” “Because she’s mine and I don’t want you touching her.”

“I love you, Sunshine,” I tell her, before I lose my nerve. “And I don’t give a shit whether you want me to or not.”