A Sea of Unspoken Things

by Adrienne Young

Between the feeling of that bullet in my chest and the guilt that I carried for leaving Johnny behind, I couldn’t let go of the feeling that there was something more to all of this. Like the forest had finally balanced the scales. Like she’d waited all this time to punish us for what we’d done.

He was there the first time my heart beat, the first time air entered my lungs, the first time the sun touched my face. But now, he’d gone back to the dark without me.

Long before I was in love with him, we’d been threaded together in that permanent way that happened when your childhoods were interwoven. When you grew with someone. When they knew versions of you that no one else did. There was no erasing memories like that. There was no way to pretend that they didn’t go right on living beneath your skin for your entire life.

That was the way of grief, I was realizing. It was a barrage of pain that was so unbearable that it made you numb. And then out of nowhere, something made you feel again and the cycle started over from the beginning.

“We could fill the fucking ocean with the things we never said to each other.”

I didn’t know if it was this place or if it was me, but sitting out there in the firelight, the rain falling in the gorge, I’d been sixteen again. Seventeen. Eighteen. I’d been every version of myself that was in love with Micah Rhodes.

What could we possibly say? I couldn’t even pretend to know how you could take a whole life, a whole person, and put it into words. Goodbye is a lost language. A silent one.

The brother I’d laid to rest deep in the heart of the forest only minutes before had been unraveled and inspected. Picked apart. And for the first time ever in my life, I felt like I really understood him. He was this forest. Vastly unknowable and enduringly steady. A persistent force at the center of my world. And maybe in that way, he would never really be gone.