A Sea of Unspoken Things

by Adrienne Young

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.

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 learned a long time ago that the last people you can trust to find the truth are the people who get paid to do it.” He glanced at the diner window. “Sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.”

I could see now that everything that led to the moment he died had more to do with the randomness of things, the unpredictability of the universe, than it had to do with me. I’d tried to control it all for so long only to find that in a way, none of it mattered. And yet, all of it did.

high school’s east wing, my reflection a shifting shape on the floor. The entire building changed on the weekends, with light casting unbroken beams at an angle through the windows and the open emptiness of the rooms almost resonant.

And I guess that was what was so horrible about accidental deaths, like Amelia said. In a moment, with no meaning whatsoever, someone could just be…gone.

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.

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.

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