Tick.
I sifted through the menu at the diner. Couldn’t decide what to eat. Spent half an hour looking at the old, yellow pages. I wondered how they would have looked when they were first printed and given out to their first customers. How many years ago would that have happened. On the table next to me, Jack was waiting a table. The family had a baby in a stroller with them. I remember coming to this diner from when I was that age. Would we have looked any different from how these people did? Laughing, cracking inside jokes that others wouldn’t be able to understand, the mom lecturing her son, dad with telling the same story they must have heard a million times with an evergreen smile that would never fade telling it. I ordered a coffee.
Tick.
I walked. Walked anywhere my legs would take me. Along the river, the park I used to walk my dog, Taylor, the bench where me and Trisha used to talk and eat lunch on our break. I saw kids skipping stones, playing tag, teenagers skateboarding, parents with their kids, an old couple having a picnic. It must’ve been odd that amongst all of this a middle-aged unshaven man, shabbily dressed in a suit sat on the grass barefooted. Heels digging into the soft earth, I leaned back, gazed at the golden sky and let the sun drip down my face. It was warmer than I remembered. Or maybe I’d just forgotten what it felt like.
The wind was picking up slowly. The breeze rustled through the leaves yet there was a stillness in the air. The most kind of quiet you could expect to get in a park in the evening. My body relaxed as I let go and felt the grass tickling my ears. I could almost pretend none of it had happened. That she’d still be waiting for me when I got home, slippers on her feet, hair wet from the shower, humming that off-key tune from the show she never admitted she liked. The breeze passed and all that was left was a sourness in my mouth and the weight in my chest.
Tick.
I waited for the metro on my way to work. The platform buzzed with quiet impatience. I looked around. So many faces, all different, all unknown. Strangers I’d never have the pleasure, or the awkwardness of knowing. Each carrying their own quiet griefs and minor victories, private joys stitched into long commutes and coffee breaks. But here, they were just a sea of fleeting, anonymous expressions. Most of them looked like me, tired office workers, migrating toward cubicles and fluorescent lights. We shared the same rhythm. Same routine.
The train was late. Not by much, but enough to unsettle the crowd, I noticed. Shoulders stiffened. Eyes glanced down at watches. Phones were checked, sighed at, returned to pockets. That’s when I really noticed them. The slumped postures, the sagging eyes. The way we all shifted our weight from foot to foot, like it mattered. There was something strangely comforting about it. This quiet, shared frustration. We were all bound by the same invisible thread, tethered to desk chairs from nine to five, day in and day out. I was lost in the observation of it all when the metro finally arrived. The doors screeched open. People surged forward like water through a broken dam. I didn’t move with them. I ran.
Tick.
The ocean water touched my feet, and the soft sand made imprints of my feet as I sat there with rolled up pants. It’s funny the way the world continues. Kids still fall and cry. Mothers still wipe off dirt and kiss scraped knees. Dads still play catch with their kids. Time doesn’t care that you’re stuck. It just goes on, like a freight train with no brakes, dragging you behind it whether you’re ready or not.
I watched a dog, some kind of golden retriever mix, chase a butterfly near a sandcastle. A boy laughed, squealing and chasing after it, arms flailing, joy spilling from his mouth in shrieks and laughter as the dog spun in dizzy circles. I remember Trisha laughing like that, too. Once. Back when we were younger, when everything felt too big and too possible to be real. We were always dreaming then. Planning trips we never took. I looked at my hands. Worn, a little calloused. These were the same hands that held her. I’d rest my chin on her shoulder, and she’d sigh like it annoyed her, but she always smiled. Always. Now, the only thing between these fingers was wet sand. it was like watching a memory that didn’t belong to me anymore.
The tide rolled in a little higher. I shifted back, not bothering to shake the sand from my fingers. I barely noticed her at first. She was seated not too far from me, near where the tide reached its highest—barefoot, knees drawn up, a long scarf wrapped around her shoulders like armor. The wind played with loose strands of silver-streaked hair as she turned the pages of a worn paperback, but it didn’t look like she was really reading. Her eyes were on the water. When our eyes met, she gave me a soft nod. Not a smile. Not quite. Just a quiet acknowledgment. “You look like someone who’s been speaking to ghosts,” she said, her eyes returning to her book. I didn’t respond. Didn’t need to.
She let the silence bloom between us, like bruises rising under skin. Then she glanced at me again, eyes grey and wind-washed, full of unsaid things. “I come here when I forget how to breathe,” she continued. “It’s the only place where the world doesn’t ask anything of me.” Her voice wasn’t soft. It was stripped, something raw and worn down to bone. There was no performance in it. “I used to sit right there,” she nodded toward where I was. “My brother used to run along the waterline like a boy chasing light. He died before I could say goodbye. They handed me his wallet in a plastic bag.” She pressed her palm flat into the sand. “It’s strange how we keep breathing, right? Just tell ourselves it’ll be okay when we know it won't and just try to keep going as if our lungs aren’t aware they’ve been robbed of their reason.” I swallowed. Something splintered behind my ribs. “Grief is the cruellest kind of architect. It rebuilds you with hollow rooms. You wake up in a stranger’s body and call it healing.” She looked down at her fingers, sand clinging to the creases like dust to memories. “I stopped trying to move on. That phrase always sounded like betrayal.” I mumbled. “You don’t let go,” she continued. “You carry. Carefully, quietly. Some days it's heavy. Some days it's not. But it becomes part of you. The weight changes, but it’s always there.” I closed my eyes. The waves crashed.
I thought about how the sea devours everything: names, laughter, footprints. And still keeps coming. She tore a piece of paper from the edge of her book and wrote something in it, the writing slanted and rushed, as I got up and brushed the sand off my pants. “Sometimes the hardest part is simply standing still long enough for the storm to settle.” She shrugged and gave me the paper “Just in case.” I didn’t answer. I just took it, nodded again and walked away, coat in hand, shoes still off. “I hope the tide is kind to you,” she shouted behind me. I didn’t look back.
That night, I didn’t drink. First time in a long time. Instead, I pulled out the box. The one I’d stuffed in the closet a few weeks after the funeral. Covered in dust. Smelled like mothballs and time. Inside were her letters. Her photos. A polaroid of us on our first trip to the beach. I was squinting into the sun. She was laughing, mouth wide open, wind tangling her hair. I cried. Not like before. Not the kind of crying that breaks you open and leaves you hollow. But soft. The kind that seeps through and leaves space for something else to grow. I don’t think grief ever really leaves. It just changes shape. And eventually, if you let it, you learn how to live around it. Like roots curling around a stone buried deep in the soil. After all, you’ve got to have a little bit of dark on a canvas to see the light as well.
The next morning, I woke up and opened the window. The air smelled like rain. I brewed a cup of coffee. Stronger this time. Sat by the window and watched the street come to life. I took out the piece of paper from yesterday's pants and called the number written on it. For the first time in years, I didn’t feel like I was waiting for something that would never come back.
I just let everything be.
React
