The sea rippled, tensing up the five letters. Voiced on the waves, it was his voice, saying the word.
Sorry.
So sorry.
He had been so bitter, so angry. She reciprocated; they felt and fought the same woe. There had been conflict, peeling them apart as grief continued to set in. He watched the waves clash, the waves rolling to the unforeseen. The waves seemed to point the way. The waves ran into each other, the sound made upon colliding as if to say, delve deeper. If he jumped off the edge he would still be swimming. There’s no changing the fact that, in the tense exhales of aftermath, he now understood.
He had led them nowhere. He might have been confident that they could return but… return where? Therein lies the problem. He had no clear destination in mind.
The past, once so certain, simply met with the horizon, forming the entire expanse that eluded him.
The floating there was indeed a waiting, in the same way what he worded-out as a perfect apology was simply more talk of the mind. The mind unraveled, talking itself into untold corners that should have been a helpful shadow under a scorching sun, pulverizing his ability to see. And yet he watched, looking for signals in the sea. Sorry.
Sorry for having shouted at you. Sorry for making no sense. Sorry for being nonsense. Sorry for letting this happen. I might have saved you. And then, as per the talk of talking back, more apologies, sorry for thinking that I could.
Having to say something, this is what he said:
“I love you.” He meant it but he wanted to tell her so much more than those three words, a phrase that synchronizes the various complications that turn any relationship into a wreckage of memory and breakneck feelings, a kind of loathing that led to the desire to love again.
I love you. It wasn’t an apology but it would have to do. No more looking away. He used his turn to face her. He blinked once and decided that her eyes would once again be hers.
HER TURN
She closed one eye and cupped her hand around the other, focusing in on a patch of water where waves merged to mimic the shape of a human mouth. The sea wanted to speak, but all she heard were the words that she kept to herself. Accusatory in nature, she hid in the borrowed body, secretly attacking herself for having pushed the only one still close by, even after everything, and quite literally everything, disappeared beyond the horizon. He remained her anchor and chain as much as she was his. Never mind their past; never mind their future. The present was what got the best of her. It was what worried her most. It was what pulled at her, a threat that nothing would change; no matter how much she did to bargain a better draw.
Reverted to the past, she rode out the same lines that could be reread, if one desired, in the preceding turns, during that stage of letting go that had brought her to this juncture in the first place.
Quick to nag, quick to be numb, she wasn’t swimming to escape him. She swam to escape herself. The fact that seeing him meant having to see that vain smile, the threat to be perfect that made her a threat to everyone brought close, only tightened the tether, soaked it in kerosene, ready to spark with a single shift of the situation. If anything went wrong, she was the tantrum to turn everything to cinders. Burnt ash.
Flicker but nothing fades. She was still here.
Bathed in sunlight, the borrowed body felt heavier, and she watched, distantly felt, as it began to stink. The sweat was yellow, the bodily fluids escaping the drying body, a murky brown, it was an odor that only she could smell. The water would wash it away, she thought. A smell so overpowering and bitter when she brought back up the past, every single time she had treated him as less.
Less a man and more a burden.
She banked on herself before she would any bond.
The water tempted her, the mock-mouth opening and closing as she heard the thoughts in mind resonate across the waves.
He would do anything for you. You were on your deathbed and he tried to save you. He did all he could and listened through all your nonsense, all your bullshit and stupid blaming. Even when you forgot how to breathe, how to blink, he breathed for you. He remained at your side, putting drops in your eyes.
Her with a question. Her with an answer.
The waves mouthing the word:
Sorry. But when she tried to speak, she saw that words alone weren’t what had begun to expire. Beyond the sundrenched scene existed a limitation; a borrowed body was a body all the same. Past-due and setting sail across curious waters that no physical map would ever reveal, not even so much as a mark, the body becomes the final marker, the final compass pointing the direction of expiration. Sorry. Say it.
I am sorry.
She tore open the mouth stitched closed by dry lips, saying all that she believed she had heard. Everything that she needed to have told him, meant to tell him for so long, as long as it will take to tell the entire tale, the hundreds of pages, and perhaps so much more, but for all the effort, all that she had wanted to say, every line that had been fought over in her mind, became invisible as it left her mouth. Invisible to both line and page. The only words that came out were the same words he had told the sea.
“I love you.”
Neither character heard each other, relegated to speak without using speech, but for that one moment, when she listened to what she had said, articulated in his voice, a fire rose that gave her the cue to turn and face him.
If it meant saying “I love you” a thousand times to rid herself of the smell, she would drench the coffin in the word “love.”
HIS TURN
He met her eye-to-eye, blinked when she blinked, and breathed out when she pretended to breathe. He saw a sweaty, double-chinned, bald face, a face so familiar, it took him this long to get the lines right. It took an entire life; by now, those lines were the length of waves headed in no clear direction.
He met her mouth with his and then said, “Are we having fun?” Imagining what she might be thinking, he bartered another “I love you,” and watched the sparkle in those eyes.
How dull he must appear to her from behind those old, apathetic eyes. Desperate though he may have been, he bargained that she saw only a fraction of the sunlight, understood only a small flicker of his apology.
“I love you” was her response.
“I love you” was his only reply.
“I love you” once again, he began to see tears welling up, tears that had seldom been shed from those sorrowful, admittedly unremarkable eyes.
He said it again, and watched as they started down her face. He wiped them away before they could travel down her cheek; dragging a finger across her face forced him to feel the various blemishes and pockmarks, grime and skin tearing of a body he had misused.
“I love you,” he said and meant every word.
“I love you,” she replied and seemed to retreat into that body. Their faces flush, hands held, potbelly and nearly flat-breasted chest pressed, he could sense her fleeing him in the one way possible. He had so much to tell her.
He met her fault with his, which came out as a forlorn and melancholy “I love you.”
It is admirable to see someone care about another so much that he’d say anything to conceal true feeling, to keep her here. I love you, I love you, I love you — repeated in a rhythm that matched what’s missing:
A heartbeat.