A Sea of Unspoken Things

by Adrienne Young

But I also knew that accidents didn’t happen in that forest. Not really. There was almost nothing that was random or by chance because the place was alive—intentional.

I’d grown up feeling like the trees had eyes, each tangle of roots like a brain that held memories. I could feel, even now, that they remembered me.

The camera had been the eye through which Johnny saw the world. A window, where he could watch from a safe distance.

I’d seen it in the way adults looked at us, and even talked about us. Like I was the good half and Johnny, the bad. But what people had never understood about my brother was that he was just willing to do what he thought he had to and there weren’t many lines he wouldn’t cross to make those things happen. He didn’t care about perception or reputation. It was like he’d been born without that hardwiring the rest of us had—the instinctive fear that made you need to belong.

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.”

Both of us had always been trying to capture moments and keep them. Him with the camera, me with my pen. But in the end, we somehow always saw things differently.

I thought that if I left, I could erase it. I could somehow recast who I was in a different life.

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.