A Sea of Unspoken Things

by Adrienne Young

The part of me that wasn’t constructed of bone and blood had just…known.

The days that made up that version of me were filled with gallery openings, poetry readings, and cocktail hours—things that made me forget the sun-starved, evergreen-scented life I’d left behind.

He was drawn to them—the secretive creatures that only came out in the darkness. And deep down I knew that it was because he was one of them.

Johnny had spent the last two years working remotely for a conservation project documenting five different owls in and around Six Rivers National Forest. The opportunity had seemed so serendipitous that I should have known there was something wrong with it.

Johnny had never been lucky. Stars didn’t align for him and opportunities didn’t just drop into his lap.

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.

I was sure that at some point, it would grow thin as he pulled away from this world. But the hope I’d held on to that I would walk through that door and finally begin to sense his absence was a point of fading light now. He was still here. He was still everywhere.

Anxiously, the dog explored each room of the small cabin, as if checking to see if Johnny was here. I’d had the same urge when I walked through the door.

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.

I pressed my forehead to Smoke’s, breathing through the emptiness that filled the cabin around us. A place where Johnny shouldn’t be anymore. But somehow, he was.

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.

I tapped my phone screen for the tenth time, checking for a notification that he had texted. I wasn’t sure if I was hoping he would or wouldn’t.

I knew the sensation. It was the same one I had every time the hollow space between me and Johnny bled together. When the feelings flooding his mind pushed into my own. I was usually good at drawing a clear boundary between what was him and what was me, but this was different. It was as if the hours Johnny had spent at this desk still hovered in the cabin like an echo of his existence.

He’d earned himself a reputation for being fearless, but that day was the first time I began to realize that we weren’t immortal. That I could lose him. And that terror had opened a kind of doorway between us.

The traces he’d left behind were still alive all around me, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d keep tripping those wires.

It was the very first time in my life that I’d admitted it to myself. That I didn’t just love Johnny. I was scared of him, too.

Those two were like family and family’s like that. Just as likely to kill them as you are to kill for them.”

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.

Micah was the only person who knew my brother like I did. How to see his storms coming. How to weather them. How to protect him from himself. And that had been the biggest problem between us—Johnny.

Any missing funds, I’d cover or account for myself before the documentation went to CAS, because that’s what I always did. I covered for my brother. I’d been doing it for my entire life.

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.

To Johnny, life was very simple. He only belonged to himself, and his only job was looking after me. The problem was, at some point that became my only job, too—looking after Johnny. And that wasn’t a simple task.

In some version of these events, Micah had just won. And if he didn’t reply, I’d have the answer to the question I hadn’t had the guts to ask for twenty years. Whether everything I’d done—everything I’d not done—had been enough to sever the ties that seemed to eternally bind us together.

I could hear the disappointment in the silence on the other end of the line, and I hated that feeling. Like every time Quinn tried to open a door, I was gently closing it.

He’d found a purpose in the project. A sense of meaning. I even remembered feeling almost envious of him. Like Johnny had something that made him feel alive and connected to the world when I hadn’t felt that in a long time.

But Micah wasn’t just good at wearing me down. He also knew exactly how to not scare me away.

The smile on his face made the clock rewind ten years. Twelve. Fifteen. Until the man standing in that rectangle of light was the first boy who loved me. The first and only one I ever loved back.

That was like him, I thought. Micah was never one to hide things, like the rest of us. He didn’t pretend.

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

The first time Micah kissed me, I’d felt like I’d been waiting my whole life for it. And that’s what this felt like now. Like the entire world was rotating around us.

I knew this feeling, the mind-clearing connection between my eyes and my hand. I hadn’t felt it in years.

It didn’t matter how many times I saw the Northern California coast. There was always something that felt unknown about it, even when it was familiar. The way the waves climbed hungrily up the beach and then tore away. As if the sea was writhing with anger.

I was terrified of when it would end, because I could feel in my bones that it would.

I sat on the beach, my fingers buried deep in the sand as I stared out at the opaque water. This sea reminded me of my brother. The weary, windblown cypress trees on the bluff, the brutal cliff face.

The harshness of the environment made things grow differently here, and maybe Six Rivers was like that, too. I wondered now if that’s why Johnny had always said that we were made in the dark.

I had always wanted to believe that I understood Johnny in a way that no one else did. That I had a handle on what he was and wasn’t capable of. But my mind wasn’t just spinning now. It was unwinding. I had the distinct feeling that the world around me was coming undone. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

What I hadn’t expected was that Micah hadn’t once tried to stop me. He’d never even said that he didn’t want me to go. After that night in the gorge, he stopped calling. Stopped coming by. He pulled away from me until I was so alone that I didn’t feel like I could stay.

I wasn’t just afraid of becoming my mother anymore, getting stuck in this town and letting it erase me. I was afraid of the person I’d already become.

I wasn’t ever actually scared of Johnny. I knew he’d open his own veins before he ever let anything happen to me. But I was scared, I was terrified, of finding out who he really was.

But that’s what this forest did, wasn’t it? Tell the same stories over and over?

I knew my brother. I thought I knew him. But everything that had happened since I got to Six Rivers told me I didn’t. I didn’t know why I was surprised. Johnny had always had secrets; I just didn’t want to see them. And now, standing in the aftermath of his life, all I could do was wait for the smoke to clear.

I couldn’t feel the heat brimming beneath my skin or the stinging cold in my fingertips anymore. I couldn’t feel any single thing because if I did, I’d feel it all—an entire ocean of pain and regret and fear that I’d held on to like a life raft for my entire life.

I looked back over my shoulder before the cabin was swallowed by the trees. It didn’t look the same to me anymore. Nothing did. I was questioning every memory now, every truth. Taking apart and reshaping all the details of the lives we’d lived here and what they meant. But maybe that was just it. Maybe there was no meaning anymore.

I was finally accepting that there was no riddling out the puzzle that was my brother. There never had been.

For days, he’d been putting distance between us, but here, between the walls of the home he’d made without me, I felt like maybe there was part of him that was within reach.

I smiled, but it hurt. “You were right, you know.” “About what?” “That we could fill an ocean with the things we never said.”

What no one knew was that I’d questioned that decision a thousand times since I made it. Looking back now, I didn’t think I would change it. I wouldn’t give up Byron or my work or the life I’d made in the city. But I also didn’t know if it was what I wanted anymore.

“You don’t hate me?” I took a chance in asking the one question that I was most afraid to have answered. Micah’s mouth tilted in a half grin. “I wish I could hate you. It would have made things a lot easier.” We both laughed, and it felt good. Like we were speaking a language we’d forgotten.