𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐄𝐋 𝐒𝐔𝐌𝐌𝐄𝐑! [𝐉𝐉 𝐌𝐀𝐘𝐁𝐀𝐍𝐊]

chapter thirteen.

CRUEL SUMMER!
chapter thirteen.

( it's rotten work. )

                       Waves can never stray too far from the ocean. They can try - they can stretch far across the white-sand shore, asserting some semblance of escape - but it's a hopeless endeavor. It's a bounded fate, for a wave to inevitably return back home into the fierce complexity that is the ocean.

It's the same as it always is, the waves and ocean, each an extension of the other, unavoidably coming back together as one. There's something desperate about it - a tragic sort of longing that lingers within the depths of saltwater. No matter how much a wave tries to stray from the ocean, how utterly it attempts to make it past the waterline, screaming against it - naturally, they get pulled back in, washed out by the current. And it's back to square one.

Like a void you simply can't fill.

The beach is silent, empty and dark and overwhelmingly lonely. Only me and the anguished waves.

I used to truly like my loneliness. Often, I'd regard it as solitude - and solitude was the one commodity that I valued above any other aspect of my life. That was where the safety harbored, where I could feel at peace.

At some point, the difference between solitude and loneliness had grown indistinguishable. It all faded together into a quiet confine and dark stillness that had become my preferred state. A deep, dark comfort, like sinking to the bottom of the ocean and settling into the abundant nothingness of it all. It was exactly how I liked it.

That is, until I finally felt the intangible warmth of the sun on my skin, after so long of living in frigid darkness. And then I was desperate, tragically and fruitlessly longing to escape the confines of loneliness that I'd created for myself. Not that it mattered, anyway. It's inevitable, after all, for the waves to return back into the ocean. No amount of warmth can change that.

The sand beneath me is cold to the touch, but there's still a lingering fury that simmers at the pit of my chest, angry with him, with myself, deadly resenting all that I'm feeling. The waves keep crashing to the shore, expressing a silent rage and desperation that I find all too resemblant, because I know the hopeless pain they're in. I sit with it now, letting it scald me, because I'm also still insistent that this is what needed to happen. It's ridiculous to give one individual all that meaning, all that power over you. Even if it's with him that I've only ever felt whole. Even if he may deserve it. I know this is what needed to happen—

But I never expected it to feel this way. Nothing has truly hurt me before, not in the way that it hurt to watch him leave. Not the way that it hurts to know it was my doing. It feels suffocating, like nothing has ever made me feel before.

Confusion is an awful feeling. One I'm not terribly accustomed to. JJ, I've come to realize, is an unfortunate embodiment of all of my confusions. Everything that has ever been and ever will be outside of my field of understandings, it's him. And what's worse is that I hardly even cared for it anymore. At first it was staggering, to feel so much so abruptly. But eventually it stopped being so abrupt, and it began to just be. He made it that way, never shying away or questioning any new affection I'd be compelled to share with him. I've never been made to feel safe about that before. It was like he introduced me to an estranged version of myself that I had never known. Like he showed me a kinder, gentler way to exist.

I frown at the thought, the sickening truth to it. My knuckles ache, in a way that feels much deserved. I dig my fist into the frigid specks of sand, intending for some relief. Instead, I find that the sharp grains are much too rough against the raw, sensitive skin, only irritating my knuckles further. It hurts, but I find I actually prefer it this way.