The tide has turned and the waves are swallowing the shore - closer now, insistent, as if the sea itself wants to erase the footprints I once thought permanent. I stare into that impossible blue and realize my present is not merely dulled; it has been drained.
To call it gray would be an act of mercy that I don't feel entitled to. Gray suggests repair, a possibility of stitching color back into the edges. What I sit inside is emptier than that: a hollow that echoes, a washed-out silence where dreams once hummed.
I try to summon a shard of light - one little shimmering thought that could be a beginning - but every hopeful filament is yanked down by a violent undertow of other feelings: guilt that tastes like sour salt, anger small and hot as coal, a heaviness that sits in the pit of my stomach and refuses to be ignored.
These emotions are not gentle teachers; they are predators. They circle, they claw, they drag me into the undertow. The more I reach for air, the more my limbs learn the weight of defeat.
When the waves hit the rocks, the sound is not oceanic music but a verdict - sharp, abrupt, claustrophobic. It mirrors the pressure I feel in my chest: loud, relentless, unfolding the scene that started all this.
Memory returns not as a scene but as a series of sensations - his laugh like a bell, the tilt of his head, the small cruelty disguised as a joke; the way ordinary mornings turned extraordinary and then, quietly, poisonous.
The present funnels me back to that first cracked seam when doubt should have been louder than longing, to the slow, almost tender sabotage that became betrayal.
My body responds before my mind. My hands go numb. Breath shortens. I taste salt and metal and regret. I replay the beginning like a film on loop, searching for the precise frame I could have frozen.
There's no single frame - only the accumulation of little permissions I gave, compromises that looked harmless at breakfast and monstrous by dusk. The sea answers with another crash, and for a second it feels like the world is applauding my unraveling.
And yet - even here, raw on the sand with the undertow tugging at my ankles - some small stubborn thing inside nods. Not hope, not yet; that word feels extravagant. But a recognition: that this pain is not mere punishment, it is language. It is telling me what must be tended, what must be guarded, what must never again be traded for the easy glow of someone else's warmth.
I do not know if I'll rise whole. I only know I will have to learn the cadence of my breath again, map the borders of my own shore, and decide what I will carry forward and what I will, finally, let the sea claim.