A Sea of Unspoken Things

by Adrienne Young

He was still here. He was still everywhere.

“I mean, I guess I’ve always felt like it makes the most sense that we would just…become a part of everything else, you know?” He waved a hand at the surrounding darkness, where the sound of the rain and wind still swelled. “This can’t just all be for nothing, right?”

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

!!!!

“I was thinking the opposite, actually. That Johnny seemed to understand that we’re not so different. That in the end, we—us, the owls, the fish down there”—she pointed at the window that looked out over the water—“we’re all just…animals.”

I didn’t know if I could do it. Leave Johnny, Micah, Six Rivers. I didn’t know if I wanted to. But after what we did, everything I wanted to stay for was tainted with that decay. I didn’t like who we were anymore, and I thought that if I left, I could erase it. I could somehow recast who I was in a different life.

The picturesque town was like a painting against the unruly beauty of the forest. On the surface, it seemed like such a perfect place. A refuge from the chaos of the world. And maybe it was once, before the trees were scooped out to build a town for people to live. Before this place had been touched by humanity. Now, where there were people, there was pain. Even in a place like this.

Goodbye is a lost language. A silent one.

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.

“I thought you said you were never going to be that guy in a tux,” I said, my voice as brittle as snow. “Guess I figured out I can be anything if I’m with you.”

Maybe we were made in the dark, like Johnny said. But we’d found a way to create our own kind of light.