Page 6 of Written in the Oceans

I don’t hear anything else. Just bits and pieces of a conversation.

“Deadly impact.”

“Brain dead.”

“Organ donation.”

And every memory after that moment blurs. It drifts off into a space that I can’t fully retrieve it from and only fragments of it stay embedded in my brain. Like how I sat in a cold plastic chair for hours, the bones of my butt digging into the hard plastic while my mom and I waited. As we sat and waited, the stages of grief continued to course through us without permission, inherently passing by as we processed the biggest loss of our lives.

We returned home, his belongings in a small bag, a shell of our former happy family. We left with our hearts in that hospital on a cold bed, buried with no chance of returning into the hollow hole in our chests.

Sometime after my dad’s death, years after it happened and when everyone assumed we had picked up the pieces of our lives, my grandma visited us. She mentioned the wordsebb and flow.She used the phrase to describe her grief over the loss of her only child. While she didn’t always remain in a constant state of mourning, it was always there. It came and went as it pleased, never fully allowing her to move on. That was exactly how I learned to manage my grief, through the ebb and flow of my own heartache. It would come during the moments I would least expect it, hitting me hard and placing me into a deep depression that I couldn’t explain. It would sit there while I stared off into nothing, often that nothing being a television screen, for hours, days, watching the flickering light in the stale darkness of my room. I wouldn’t think about anything during that time. My mind would be blank. Not because I wanted it to be but because it would already be full from the soul-crushingly heavy weight of my grief, making no room for anything else. And then those days would pass as if they never happened. I would come out relatively the same and go on with my life. The ebb and flow would continue in waves, sometimes small enough that it didn’t become debilitating and sometimes so hard that even the shrill screams that expelled from my lungs weren’t enough to dull the pain. But that’s the thing with heartache that comes and goes. While it may leave for a short period of time, it always comes back. And all I can do is welcome it like an old friend.

So in the meantime, while I wait for the next wave of grief to show up at my door unannounced and unwelcome, I go day to day. I try to make it to the next morning and keep my head held as high as I can, evading the rush of water trying to drown me. Sometimes I feel like I’m waiting to be rescued, but maybe it’s my way of believing that I don’t have to live like this forever. That there’ll be some sort of consolation at the end. But that sounds more like senseless optimism at this point, foolish and imprudent.

I leave the still intact wine bottle on the kitchen counter, the desire to drown my sorrows in a second glass sitting alongside it, and walk to my room. My hands trace over my shelf of books lining the wall next to my door. The collection of leather and clothbound books has grown in number throughout the years, all scattered alongside paperbacks with tattered spines and dog-eared pages. I slump into my mattress, my body feeling heavier than it actually is.

When Aunt Janice leaves, both she and Walter calling out their farewells from the living room, I’m sitting in the dark. My knees hug against my chest and the TV screen flashes silently, creating a strobe-like effect in my small room. When my mom knocks softly on my door, I don’t answer. I listen to her whisper “goodnight” through the cracked opening and her footsteps fading away. Sometime in the night, I drift off. My mind is finally numb enough to turn everything off, muted enough for me to fall into a dreamless sleep.

It’s the numbness I crave. Because when you’re numb, you don’t feel. And when you don’t feel, there’s no pain. No joy, no excitement, no sadness. Just a paralysis that feels like a dream.

* * *

Beep. Beep. Beep

God, has my alarm always been this annoying? My outreached hand hits the decade-old digital clock flashing neon green numbers.

07:47.

Crap!I overslept. I know I hit the snooze button a few times, but I must have lost track of how many. My upper body springs to life, the covers flying off me, and my bare feet hit the rough carpet. The blood drains from my head, leaving me disoriented and dizzy.

My closet door slides open with a loud crack, and my hand slices through the vertical lines of hanging clothes, sliding them left to right as the clicking of hangers makes my urgency louder. Angus, our elderly black lab, pokes his head through the small opening at my door as he announces his arrival and extends his morning greeting, most likely hearing the commotion coming from my room. I’m in the world’s biggest hurry but can’t resist the temptation to scratch his ears. When I do, his tail thumps heavily on the thick carpet. At fourteen, his once shiny black coat is gradually being replaced by coarse patches of white fur, and his down-turned eyes look heavier with each passing day.

“Excuse me,” I croak through my morning voice as I sidestep past him, glancing quickly at my wall clock.

08:03.

I have exactly seven minutes before I need to be out the door and hurdle into rush hour traffic. I take those seven minutes to splash water on my face, brush my teeth, and run a brush through my thick, wavy hair. Breakfast is out of the question at this point.

“Ellie! Are you up?” I hear my mom call from the kitchen.

One last stop in my room to shove my laptop into my backpack, and I walk into the kitchen.

“Oh, there you are,” my mom says, setting down a coffee mug before stuffing papers and her laptop into a brown leather briefcase, readying for her day as an HR manager at Hoffman & Abermann Law Group. The coffee smell is inviting, calling to me to forgo the first thirty minutes of my lecture so I can enjoy a cup. The crisp blouse my mom paired with gray dress pants looks so executive and professional in contrast to my lightweight hoodie and worn jeans. So much so that if seen in public together, most would assume that we were strangers.

“Shouldn’t you be on the road already?”

“I overslept,” I mumble, still not fully awake yet.

“Oh, that’s not fun. There’re some granola bars in the pantry. So you have something in your stomach.”

“Okay. Thanks, Mom,” I say, thinking to myself how I hate the texture of granola bars and how sweet they are.

That’s the last thing I call out before I rush out the door, hopping into my maroon-colored Converse with the irresistible scent of coffee wafting behind me.

As soon as my foot hits the cement pavement of our driveway, my hand moves up, hovering above my forehead to shield my eyes. It’s spring. The normally chilly winds from the lingering winter are past us now, and the air is becoming warmer, more comfortable, reminding us that summer is just around the corner.

Southern California has always been inordinately bright and fiercely blinding. And I’ve never learned how to fully embrace it. After twenty-two seasons in Los Angeles, I would assume that my senses would have adapted to the persistent sunshine but instead, I simply exist in it.

---