A Sea of Unspoken Things

by Adrienne Young

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.

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.

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.

The gorge was like an unraveling seam in the universe, a portal to a new realm where nothing else existed.

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

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.

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