Love and the Sea and Everything in Between

chapter forty-four

Adam hasn't said a word since his waking. Mostly, he sleeps and eats. I see the color returning to his skin, but there's something in his eyes when he looks at me and I don't know what it is. There's this blankness – a numbness – that lurks just beneath the surface.

I feel lost and I don't know what to do so mostly, when his parents aren't there, I just sit in the chair beside him while he sleeps and sometimes when he's awake. But staring at him when he's awake seems strange so I try to busy myself with my phone or a magazine.

Out of the blue on one lonely April afternoon, Adam speaks for the first time and I look up at him, eyes wide with expectation, mouth open in stunned silence. "Why are you here?" he asks, his voice raw.

I'm a little surprised by the question. "What?"

He says it again slowly this time, as if he thinks me unable to comprehend his words. "Why are you here?"

"That's a stupid question."

"No, it isn't. We haven't said a word to each other in what? Two months?"

"Sixty-five-and-a-half days," I mutter.

"So why are you here?"

Untucking my legs from under me, I reach for his journal on the nightstand. "Let me show you something." I fold the journal open on my lap. "I know I shouldn't have, but... I read your journal."

A look of hot anger flashes like lightning through his eyes, but I keep going before he has the chance to protest.

"I was confused and lost and tired of waiting for you to wake up and I had to know. So I read your journal and when I did it was like you were here and you were telling me every ugly, messed up, secret part of you and it helped me because it answered the questions that were burning inside of me. Please know that I only did it because I didn't know what else I could do. You were in a coma, for God's sake."

The expression on his face softens, but he keeps silent, waiting for more.

I find the page with my first journal entry and I hand it to him. I watch as he reads, page after page and something in his eyes changes as everything I wrote just suddenly clicks inside of him. Soon he's crying, softly, each word awakening something as it all happens in front of me.

Afraid that if I move the moment might be ruined, I sit completely still. And I just watch him, my hands folded neatly in my lap, chewing the inside of my lip.

When he's finished he starts to cry harder and he's sobbing now and I start to cry too. Standing, I move over to him and sit down next to him on the bed. I wrap my arms around him and pull him to me, letting him cry into my neck. I feel his tears cascade down my skin like a waterfall and it's all I need to know that he is alive.

I rest my head on his and rock him gently.

"I'm here, Adam," I whisper to him. "And I'm never going anywhere. Never again." I blink away the tears that start to appear in my own eyes and whisper, "I love you."

He is my everything – my healing and my wound. He is the thing that keeps me up at night and the thing that gives me purpose. And I know everything between us isn't completely better. Not yet. Life doesn't work like magic.

But he is alive and here I am with him.

And that is enough.

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