Love and the Sea and Everything in Between

chapter forty-three

This is what it's like to understand – truly understand – the weight of a life. Spending every waking hour for days watching the life fade from someone, everything hits you at once and you can't escape the thought of the person they once were and then when that goes away you're left to wonder about the person they could have been.

Now, I feel like I've seen it all and nothing could ever take me by surprise anymore. I've seen what it is to live. And I've seen what it is to die. It makes you feel invincible, to stare death in the face and say, "Not today."

That's when reality settles in. And reality is a malicious being, grasping at every seed of hope before it has the chance to take root. It claws and scrapes at every precious thing, planting its doubt and its fear and its anxiety and its anger and its regret and its shame. It takes and it takes and it takes and it never gives anything back.

Reality is a parasite and I don't feel invincible anymore.

Adam is alive and it's wonderful and it's bona fide miracle. But the mess of reality isn't gone. Everything that happened between us isn't gone. Everything that happened between me and Jeremiah and Jeremiah and Adam and Oliver and Adam isn't gone. It's still there. Reality is just salt in the wound.

Pain doesn't just disappear, I realize. Pain is as much a part of you as everything else. Pain is a scar that never fades and you can't just forget it's there.

Reality doesn't work that way – it doesn't give you a moment's rest.

No rest for the weary.

No rest for the wicked.

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