April 29, 2026
Mommy Is Dead
Mommy is dead.
She died.
No longer present to be lurking in the shadows,
around the corner,
planning her next attack.
She haunted my whole universe while breathing.
Now breathless,
the ghosts who once were in control retired.
And the demons took over.
The Water Didn’t Keep Her
My mother always talked about her death.
Sometimes she even tried speeding it up.
For a long time, I thought she was doing it for attention. I thought she wanted everyone to stop what they were doing, look at her, panic over her, prove they cared.
I didn’t understand yet that wanting attention and needing help aren’t the same thing.
I understand that now.
But understanding it does not erase what it did to us.
Because no matter what she was searching for, my sister and I were usually the ones left standing in the aftermath.
We were the ones watching.
The ones trying to help.
The ones expected to keep living normally after death had been dragged into the room again.
Water has always been my happy place.
The beach especially.
Something about standing near that much water makes everything inside me feel quieter. The waves are loud enough to cover up my thoughts, but never loud in a way that scares me. They don’t demand anything. They don’t ask me to explain myself. They just keep moving.
I have always loved that.
Maybe that is why I remember Galveston so clearly.
I was around twelve when we took the trip.
It should have been one of those memories people keep because it was fun. A family vacation. Sand in the car. Wet bathing suits hanging over chairs. Beach days and sunburns and everybody arguing about where to eat.
Normal family things.
Instead, I remember my mother walking into the water.
Not to swim.
Not to cool off.
To disappear.
My sister had to go after her.
She pulled her back out while I watched, probably not understanding everything and somehow understanding all of it at the same time.
Then my mother said it was because of us. She didn’t mean that but she did want to disappear
I don’t remember every word. Maybe my brain was kind enough to throw some of them away.
But I remember the meaning.
She wanted to die, and somehow we were supposed to carry the reason.
That is a strange thing to hand a child.
A mother’s life is already too heavy for a kid to hold.
A mother’s death is impossible.
After that, the beach was no longer just the beach.
The water had a second meaning now.
It was still beautiful, but it also became the place where my mother had tried to leave us.
That was not the only time.
There was the time she slit her wrists in front of us.
My sister had to bandage her.
My sister, who was also just a kid, had to become the person stopping the bleeding.
There should have been someone older taking control, calling for help, protecting us from seeing any of it.
Instead, my sister wrapped her wounds while I watched another moment become something we would never be able to unsee.
Then there was the gun.
My dad’s gun.
My mother took it and tried to use it on herself.
My dad fought her for it while my sister and I stood there watching.
The gun went off.
The bullet went through the pocket of my dad’s shorts.
I still think about how many different endings that moment could have had.
A slight change in angle.
A hand slipping.
A body moving at the wrong second.
One tiny difference and someone could have died directly in front of us.
Maybe my father.
Maybe my mother.
Maybe one of us.
But the bullet missed flesh, so I guess everyone was supposed to move on.
That was how things worked in our house.
If nobody died, then apparently nothing serious had happened.
There was no room for what almost happened.
No room for the fear that stayed behind.
No room for two little girls who had just watched their parents fight over a loaded gun.
The adults survived the moment, so the children were expected to survive the memory.
For years, I called it attention-seeking.
It made me angry.
Sometimes it still does.
There is a particular kind of anger that comes from watching someone threaten to leave you over and over, then blame you for making them want to go.
It teaches you that love can become a hostage situation.
It teaches you to constantly scan the room.
To watch people’s hands.
Their tone.
Their breathing.
To notice where the pills are.
Where the knives are.
Where the guns are.
To listen for crying behind closed doors.
To wonder whether every argument might become the final argument.
You become afraid of silence because silence might mean something has happened.
You become afraid of noise because noise might mean something is about to.
And somehow, in the middle of all of it, you are still expected to do your homework.
Still expected to go to school.
Still expected to act normal.
I know now that my mother was hurting.
I know pain can make people dangerous, even when the person they are trying to destroy is themselves.
I know she may not have fully understood what those moments were doing to us.
But children do not experience intentions.
They experience what happens.
We experienced blood.
We experienced water.
We experienced a gunshot.
We experienced being told that our mother wanted to die because of us.
Sometimes I feel guilty for being angry with her now that she is gone.
Death has a way of trying to turn people into saints.
But love does not require lying.
Missing someone does not mean rewriting what happened.
Understanding her pain does not mean pretending she did not pass it down to us.
She needed help.
She also hurt us.
Both things are true.
Maybe that is the hardest part.
There is no simple villain here.
Just a sick woman, two scared daughters, and a father trying to stop a gun from going off.
Just a family learning to call disaster normal because disaster kept surviving itself.
And somehow, after all of that, I still love the water.
She did not manage to take that from me.
The ocean is still where I feel calm.
I still want to stand at the edge and let the waves swallow every sound except themselves.
Maybe that is why I keep going back.
Maybe every time I stand near the water, I am returning to the place where she once tried to disappear and choosing to remain.
Maybe I am proving that the water does not only belong to that memory.
It belongs to me too.
The water did not keep her.
And somehow, it did not take me either.
I disappeared for a minute.
Not because I ran out of things to say.
If anything, life gave me way too much to say at once.
The last time I wrote here, I was still somewhere in the middle of all the fuckery. Trying to figure out how to leave, where to go, and what the hell I was doing with my life.
And somehow, a few days later, I was on a plane to Dallas to check myself into rehab.
So yeah.
We have some catching up to do.
When I got to Dallas, I did what I pretty much always do and Ubered straight to my sister’s work.
Her husband and I sat outside waiting for her to get off, and once she did, we went and got some shots and headed home.
Then me and her swam.
Just us.
And honestly, it was really fucking fun.
Nothing dramatic happened.
Nobody was fighting.
Nobody was screaming.
There wasn’t some giant life lesson hiding underneath it.
I was just swimming with my sister.
And for a little while, that was enough.
We went to sleep, woke up the next morning, got Whataburger, then went to Walmart to get everything I needed for rehab.
And, naturally, some drinks so I could get a little litty before checking myself into a place specifically designed to help me stop drinking.
Makes perfect sense.
My sister was supposed to take me, until she found out the place was downtown and immediately decided absolutely the fuck not because parking down there sucks.
My dad said he would drive.
Very clearly because she needed him to, not because he suddenly woke up dying to take his daughter to rehab.
But still.
He drove me.
When we got there, I realized I had forgotten my Zoloft.
Which apparently was enough of a problem that they almost didn’t let me check in.
Jason said he would send it, so eventually they agreed to take me.
And then they started taking everything else.
My phone.
My books.
My coloring book.
And my Inside the Insanity journal.
That one hurt.
It had my writing in it, but it also had all the phone numbers I needed written down inside.
They wanted us focused on the AA book, so pretty much everything else was taken.
And that was when everything finally hit me.
I started crying.
Not really because of the coloring book.
Not even completely because I was scared of rehab.
I think I had just reached that point where there was nowhere left for everything inside me to go.
And then my dad put his hands on my shoulders.
He told me everything was going to be okay.
And he called me Nannah.
My childhood nickname.
That probably sounds like nothing.
Two hands on my shoulders.
One nickname.
A sentence people say every day without even thinking about it.
But before my mom died, my parents were basically dead to me and I was dead to them.
So standing there, about to walk into rehab, hearing him call me Nannah made me feel like I had a dad again.
Even if it was only for a minute.
Then they left.
And I went upstairs alone.
I started putting my clothes away and met my roommate.
Her name was Stephanie.
Of course it was.
That was my mom’s name.
Stephanie had kids of her own, and almost immediately she started helping me with everything.
Not in some dramatic replacement-mom kind of way.
She just had this thing about her.
She knew what I didn’t know yet.
She helped me when I was confused.
She checked on me.
She kind of took me under her wing.
And after everything that had happened in my life, there was something weirdly comforting about walking into rehab and being put in a room with a woman named Stephanie who started mothering me a little bit.
Then there was Lauren.
Lauren was my buddy.
Everybody got assigned one when they first came in so you weren’t just wandering around the building looking lost as hell.
She showed me how everything worked, where I was supposed to be, what I was supposed to do, and basically kept me from accidentally breaking seventeen rules in my first hour.
Because they took the rules seriously.
Very seriously.
We had to be downstairs by 7:30 every morning.
And once we came downstairs, we couldn’t go back upstairs until 10 at night.
Which sucked because I was fucking exhausted.
But I was trying really hard to do everything right.
We had four meetings a day.
Chores every morning.
You could go into the kitchen and eat whenever you wanted as long as there wasn’t a meeting happening.
Trader Joe’s donated food, so for a completely free rehab, we were eating GOOD.
And weirdly, I liked the structure.
Wake up.
Go downstairs.
Do your chore.
Meetings.
Food.
More meetings.
Same thing again tomorrow.
There wasn’t much room to sit around wondering what the hell you were supposed to be doing with yourself.
I think I need that more than I realized.
The first day, though, I was basically just a giant cry baby.
Everything made me emotional.
I had just left everything I knew, flown across the country, handed over my phone, walked away from alcohol, and suddenly had nowhere to hide from my own brain.
So yeah.
I cried.
A lot.
But then it started getting easier.
I met two girls around my age and somehow rehab temporarily turned into a fucking sleepover.
We would start laughing over absolutely nothing.
And once one of us started, it was over.
We’d be trying to shut up and that would make it worse.
Someone would look at someone else.
Done.
Gone.
Laughing again.
It felt like being a kid at a sleepover and somebody’s parents were about to come through the door and tell us to shut the fuck up because it was three in the morning.
And I hadn’t laughed like that in a very long time.
Not fake laughing.
Not drunk laughing.
Not laughing because everything was fucked up and what else are you supposed to do.
Just laughing.
That might be one of the strangest things about rehab.
Some of the happiest moments I’d had in months happened inside a building I checked myself into because my life had gotten so bad I knew I needed help.
We learned about what they called the cycle of doom.
The obsession.
The first drink.
The craving.
The consequences.
The regret.
Then eventually forgetting the regret enough to convince yourself that maybe this time will somehow be different.
They taught us the AA idea of alcoholism being almost like an allergy. Not that your throat closes up or you break out in hives, but that once alcohol enters an alcoholic’s body, the reaction can be different from somebody who can have two drinks and simply decide they’re done.
That part got my attention.
Because I have spent a lot of time wondering why other people can just… stop.
Why someone can leave half a drink sitting on a table and forget it exists.
Why “just don’t drink that much” sounds like perfectly reasonable advice to someone else and completely fucking useless advice to me.
For once, somebody was explaining the question instead of just asking me why I couldn’t control myself.
And the craziest part is…
I liked rehab.
I liked the women.
I liked my roommate.
I liked Lauren.
I liked the girls I stayed up laughing with.
I liked having somewhere I was supposed to be every morning.
I liked knowing what tomorrow looked like.
Nobody did anything horrible to me.
Nobody chased me out.
The place didn’t fail me.
I left anyway.
That’s probably the part people won’t understand.
Because sometimes being somewhere you know is good for you doesn’t magically shut off the part of your brain screaming for the thing that is killing you.
The mental obsession was still there.
And eventually my entire future somehow came down to a fucking pen.
I had decided I was going to write them a letter before I left.
Except I couldn’t find my pen.
So in my head, that became the deal.
If I found the pen, I was leaving.
If I couldn’t find it, maybe that was my sign that I needed to stay.
I searched.
Nothing.
And eventually I remember thinking,
Welp.
Guess I’m staying.
Then I picked up my AA book.
And the pen fell out.
I stared at it.
Because apparently the universe and I communicate exclusively through incredibly questionable decision-making.
Welp.
Looks like I’m leaving.
Three and a half days after checking myself into rehab, I walked back out.
And that’s when the fuckery really started.
And That’s When the Fuckery Started
Three and a half days after checking myself into rehab, I walked out.
Literally.
Because I didn’t have my phone.
I called my dad three times and my sister once from the rehab phone.
Nobody answered.
Later, my dad told me he saw the calls but didn’t realize they were important because I didn’t leave a voicemail.
Which pissed me off because this man has his phone and his Apple Watch attached to him approximately ninety-seven percent of his life.
But whatever.
At that point I had already decided I was leaving, and apparently I was committed to making every possible part of that decision more difficult.
So I said fuck it.
I still had my wallet.
My plan became:
Walk until I find a gas station.
Get a drink.
Then figure out how the hell I’m getting home.
Priorities.
I found the gas station.
Got my drink.
Then walked into a hotel and asked them how far it would be to get to my dad’s house.
About six hours.
Okay.
Six hours it is.
There was absolutely no way I was spending money on a bus ticket when that money could buy alcohol instead.
Again, rehabilitation was clearly going fantastic.
So I started walking.
I walked for probably two hours before a van pulled up beside me.
And when I say van, I mean the kind of van every childhood stranger-danger video warned you about.
A murder-me van.
The guy asked if I wanted a ride.
And apparently all three and a half days of personal growth had not improved my decision-making enough because I said:
“As long as you don’t kill me.”
So I got in.
He started trying to convince me to hang out with him.
Then at one point he said something along the lines of,
“I’d make you suck my dick, but I know you’re having a bad day.”
Excuse me?
I told him immediately:
“You can’t make me do anything. You can let me out right here or take me where you said you were taking me. Your choice. But ain’t shit happening.”
And surprisingly, Murder Van Man chose option two.
He drove me close to my dad’s house.
Not all the way because I sure as hell wasn’t letting this random man know exactly where my family lived.
So I got out and walked the rest.
When my dad opened the door, I was about five seconds away from pissing my pants.
I basically told him I’d be right back and ran to the bathroom.
He looked disappointed.
Not surprised.
Just disappointed.
And somehow that hurt more.
When I came back out, I went straight into my sister’s room and woke her up because there was absolutely no way I wanted to have this conversation with my dad alone.
She opened her eyes and basically went,
“What the hell are you doing here?”
Fair question.
So I explained it.
The mental obsession won.
That was really the simplest way to say it.
And surprisingly, my dad was supportive.
He told me we could take a few days.
Regroup.
Try again.
There wasn’t yelling.
There wasn’t some giant lecture.
For a minute, it actually felt like maybe everything was going to be okay.
I went back into my sister’s room and caught her husband up on what he had missed because he had walked away toward the end of the conversation.
Then we went to the store.
Got drinks.
Got chips.
Came home.
My sister and I decided to swim again.
And once again, it was fun.
Actually fun.
We dragged her husband and my dad into playing games with us.
We were laughing.
Swimming.
Being stupid.
And for a couple hours, after leaving rehab, walking around Dallas, getting into a stranger’s van and showing up at my dad’s front door like a stray animal, I was having a genuinely good time.
That’s almost the cruel part.
Because everything was fine.
Until it wasn’t.
My dad started making dinner.
Somehow the conversation turned into abortion.
I brought up doctors potentially going to jail for performing abortions, including situations where someone had been raped.
And both of them basically said:
Yeah.
They should.
That hit something in me immediately.
I couldn’t understand it.
Especially the rape part.
I kept trying to explain what I meant, and everything I said felt like it was getting swatted out of the air before it even landed.
Eventually I remember repeating:
“I’m not the judge. I’m not the prosecutor.”
Basically my way of saying:
Fine.
We don’t agree.
We do not have to agree.
That is allowed.
Except disagreement has never really worked like that in my family.
Sometimes it feels like there are two categories:
What they believe.
And wrong.
And I’m tired of living like that.
I don’t need everybody around me to share every opinion I have.
I genuinely don’t.
I’m allowed to think something.
You’re allowed to think something else.
But don’t make me feel stupid because I don’t land where you do.
Don’t talk down to me.
Don’t act like there is something fundamentally wrong with me because my brain came to a different conclusion.
Especially when real life is almost never as black and white as people want it to be.
Someone we grew up loving like an aunt had multiple abortions.
My mom always said she personally would never get one, but she still believed it should be a choice.
And honestly, that’s how I’ve always felt too.
Especially if somebody got pregnant because something was done to them against their will.
My sister apparently feels very differently.
Which, fine.
She’s allowed to.
But I’m allowed to think forcing someone to carry a pregnancy they never chose is fucked up.
That doesn’t make me stupid.
It just means we don’t agree.
But the conversation just kept going.
And eventually I got pissed.
Because I felt like I was sitting in another room full of people explaining everything that was wrong with me while nobody wanted to look at themselves.
So I said something I probably knew would blow everything up.
Basically:
Okay.
Then if everything is black and white, shouldn’t you be in jail too for doing coke?
Silence would have probably been easier.
Instead, my sister denied it.
Completely.
Confidently.
And that made me even angrier because, from my perspective, I had seen enough over the years to believe otherwise.
And suddenly the argument wasn’t even about abortion anymore.
It was about everything.
It was about my family telling me I need help.
About everybody talking about how fucked up I am.
About me being the problem.
The addict.
The dramatic one.
The one who needs rehab.
And the thing is…
I KNOW I’m fucked up.
I talk about it constantly.
I literally made an entire website about it.
I went to rehab.
I walked into that building myself.
I am not pretending my shit doesn’t exist.
What makes me crazy is feeling like everybody else gets to point at mine while protecting theirs with both hands.
So now I’m mad.
And when I’m mad and feel like nobody is hearing me, I get dramatic.
Because somewhere along the way I learned that being calm means being ignored.
My sister and I were walking through the house and she accidentally stepped on my ankle.
I genuinely didn’t care.
I knew she didn’t mean to.
I didn’t even really think about it.
Maybe twenty seconds later, my dad and her husband came into the room.
And suddenly she said:
“Don’t touch me.”
I remember being confused.
Like…
What?
And then she started swinging at me.
She shoved me.
And I absolutely was not about to have a full-on fight with my sister.
First of all, she would probably win.
Let’s stay humble.
But more importantly, that was never where I wanted any of this to go.
I didn’t want to hurt her.
I didn’t want some giant family brawl.
I wanted somebody to acknowledge that maybe I wasn’t crazy for being frustrated.
I yelled something.
I don’t even remember exactly what anymore.
Probably something about her lying.
Probably something about this being exactly why I hate being there.
Then I did perhaps the most dramatic thing available to me.
I slapped the White Claw out of her hand.
Honestly?
I think that pissed her off more than if I had swung back.
But that was kind of the point.
It distracted everything long enough for me to leave.
So I left.
Again.
Except my stuff was still inside.
And I knew going back into that house right then was a terrible idea.
A little while later, her husband brought my things outside.
I looked at him and said something like,
“You really don’t know your wife.”
He chuckled.
“Yeah I do.”
I’m pretty sure I rolled my eyes.
“Thanks.”
And that was that.
They blew my phone up for the rest of the night.
I didn’t answer.
A couple hours before my flight, I finally called my sister.
Mostly just to tell her I was alive.
And that I was leaving.
She answered with this cold tone.
You know the tone.
The one where you can tell within the first three words exactly how the conversation is going to go.
So I pretty much immediately went:
“Alright. Love ya. Bye.”
And I got on the plane.
Back to Michigan.
Three and a half days in rehab.
One very questionable van ride.
One family fight.
One White Claw sacrificed in battle.
And somehow I ended up almost exactly where I had started.
Except maybe I wasn’t exactly the same.
A few days passed.
Then this morning my sister texted me:
“Just know I love you. I know you don’t want me to ever talk to you again. But know that I love you.”
I didn’t even see it.
A couple hours later she called.
First thing she says:
“You didn’t respond to me.”
I laughed.
Because that is rich coming from somebody who regularly leaves my messages sitting there like unopened mail.
I told her I hadn’t even seen it.
I read it while we were on the phone.
Then I told her:
“I do want to talk to you again. I love you.”
Apparently during the fight I had said I never wanted to speak to her again.
Which sounds exactly like something furious Savannah would say.
So I told her the truth.
I didn’t mean that.
I was mad.
But I am tired.
Tired of the bullshit.
Tired of feeling like I’m asking for honesty from people who demand honesty from me.
So I told her to talk to me when she could be honest.
Then I said:
“Love you. Bye.”
Later, she sent me a picture.
No explanation.
No paragraph.
No apology.
Just an Alice in Wonderland keychain.
Alice has always been my favorite quotable movie.
And I knew what she was doing.
That was my sister’s version of reaching across the mess without actually saying the words.
Her version of:
I’m still here.
Maybe I’m sorry.
Maybe I love you.
Maybe we’re both stubborn as fuck.
I replied:
“Super cute.”
Nothing more.
She read it.
Didn’t answer.
And honestly?
Maybe that’s where we are right now.
Not fixed.
Not finished.
Not enemies.
Just two sisters standing on opposite sides of a very stupid fight, occasionally sliding little pieces of Wonderland underneath the door.
Maybe someday we’ll actually talk about it.
For now,
I know she loves me.
She knows I love her.
And apparently, for this family, that’s sometimes as close to an apology as we know how to get.
The Water Didn’t Keep Her
My mother always talked about her death.
Sometimes she even tried speeding it up.
For a long time, I thought she was doing it for attention. I thought she wanted everyone to stop what they were doing, look at her, panic over her, prove they cared.
I didn’t understand yet that wanting attention and needing help aren’t the same thing.
I understand that now.
But understanding it does not erase what it did to us.
Because no matter what she was searching for, my sister and I were usually the ones left standing in the aftermath.
We were the ones watching.
The ones trying to help.
The ones expected to keep living normally after death had been dragged into the room again.
Water has always been my happy place.
The beach especially.
Something about standing near that much water makes everything inside me feel quieter. The waves are loud enough to cover up my thoughts, but never loud in a way that scares me. They don’t demand anything. They don’t ask me to explain myself. They just keep moving.
I have always loved that.
Maybe that is why I remember Galveston so clearly.
I was around twelve when we took the trip.
It should have been one of those memories people keep because it was fun. A family vacation. Sand in the car. Wet bathing suits hanging over chairs. Beach days and sunburns and everybody arguing about where to eat.
Normal family things.
Instead, I remember my mother walking into the water.
Not to swim.
Not to cool off.
To disappear.
My sister had to go after her.
She pulled her back out while I watched, probably not understanding everything and somehow understanding all of it at the same time.
Then my mother said it was because of us. She didn’t mean that but she did want to disappear
I don’t remember every word. Maybe my brain was kind enough to throw some of them away.
But I remember the meaning.
She wanted to die, and somehow we were supposed to carry the reason.
That is a strange thing to hand a child.
A mother’s life is already too heavy for a kid to hold.
A mother’s death is impossible.
After that, the beach was no longer just the beach.
The water had a second meaning now.
It was still beautiful, but it also became the place where my mother had tried to leave us.
That was not the only time.
There was the time she slit her wrists in front of us.
My sister had to bandage her.
My sister, who was also just a kid, had to become the person stopping the bleeding.
There should have been someone older taking control, calling for help, protecting us from seeing any of it.
Instead, my sister wrapped her wounds while I watched another moment become something we would never be able to unsee.
Then there was the gun.
My dad’s gun.
My mother took it and tried to use it on herself.
My dad fought her for it while my sister and I stood there watching.
The gun went off.
The bullet went through the pocket of my dad’s shorts.
I still think about how many different endings that moment could have had.
A slight change in angle.
A hand slipping.
A body moving at the wrong second.
One tiny difference and someone could have died directly in front of us.
Maybe my father.
Maybe my mother.
Maybe one of us.
But the bullet missed flesh, so I guess everyone was supposed to move on.
That was how things worked in our house.
If nobody died, then apparently nothing serious had happened.
There was no room for what almost happened.
No room for the fear that stayed behind.
No room for two little girls who had just watched their parents fight over a loaded gun.
The adults survived the moment, so the children were expected to survive the memory.
For years, I called it attention-seeking.
It made me angry.
Sometimes it still does.
There is a particular kind of anger that comes from watching someone threaten to leave you over and over, then blame you for making them want to go.
It teaches you that love can become a hostage situation.
It teaches you to constantly scan the room.
To watch people’s hands.
Their tone.
Their breathing.
To notice where the pills are.
Where the knives are.
Where the guns are.
To listen for crying behind closed doors.
To wonder whether every argument might become the final argument.
You become afraid of silence because silence might mean something has happened.
You become afraid of noise because noise might mean something is about to.
And somehow, in the middle of all of it, you are still expected to do your homework.
Still expected to go to school.
Still expected to act normal.
I know now that my mother was hurting.
I know pain can make people dangerous, even when the person they are trying to destroy is themselves.
I know she may not have fully understood what those moments were doing to us.
But children do not experience intentions.
They experience what happens.
We experienced blood.
We experienced water.
We experienced a gunshot.
We experienced being told that our mother wanted to die because of us.
Sometimes I feel guilty for being angry with her now that she is gone.
Death has a way of trying to turn people into saints.
But love does not require lying.
Missing someone does not mean rewriting what happened.
Understanding her pain does not mean pretending she did not pass it down to us.
She needed help.
She also hurt us.
Both things are true.
Maybe that is the hardest part.
There is no simple villain here.
Just a sick woman, two scared daughters, and a father trying to stop a gun from going off.
Just a family learning to call disaster normal because disaster kept surviving itself.
And somehow, after all of that, I still love the water.
She did not manage to take that from me.
The ocean is still where I feel calm.
I still want to stand at the edge and let the waves swallow every sound except themselves.
Maybe that is why I keep going back.
Maybe every time I stand near the water, I am returning to the place where she once tried to disappear and choosing to remain.
Maybe I am proving that the water does not only belong to that memory.
It belongs to me too.
The water did not keep her.
And somehow, it did not take me either.